"He turned then and looked at me. It was a look in which pity and contempt vied for supremacy. I was taken aback, for I have not been looked at in that way since my final oral examination, now some thirty years ago."

"There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't."

"In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge."

"The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself."

"She certainly did not look forty, and who can expect a woman to proclaim herself to be older than her looks?"

"When people get to be old, there's a difficulty. They want to flirt with the young people and the young people don't want them. If the old people would be content to flirt together, I don't see why they should ever give it up--till they're obliged to give up everything, and go away."

"'She's a nice girl, Polly. American -- yes,' said Ma Price, as one who is not afraid to look on the dark as well as the light side. 'But I always say,' she went on, 'that it takes all sorts to make a world, and I will say for Polly that I've never found her shooting and murdering like these Americans do all the time. A most quiet, nice, respectable girl I've always found her, and never shot anyone, as far as I know.'"

"We call England the Mother country because most of us came from Poland or Italy."

"How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms."

"Insects and
the so called lower
animals have practically
no vices at all
as compared with human beings"

   "The best elephant story used to be told by Robert Benchley, about the circus performing in an Icelandic village. A small elephant escaped into the surrounding environs of the district. Next day a woman inhabitant, who had never seen an elephant before, came running to the house of the Mayor, shouting excitedly: 'There's the most unusual animal in my back yard. He's got the biggest tail I've ever seen. And he's pulling up cabbages with it ...'
   "'Cabbages?' asked the Mayer, knowing that a vegetable is a precious commmodity in Iceland. 'What's he doing with them?'
   "'I'd rather not say,' answered the woman, blushing."

" . . . my sublimest ideas
were thought to be a total
loss when people saw
where they came from"

"The rediscovery of Aristotle had changed the intellectual climate of Europe by encouraging the study of nature; the concrete teachings of Aristotelian science, elevated into dogmas, paralyzed the study of nature. If the schoolmen had merely listened to the cheerful and encouraging timbre in the Stagyrite's voice, all would have been well; but they made the mistake of taking in what it actually said -- and insofar as the physical sciences are concerned, what it said was pure rubbish. Yet for the next three hundred years this rubbish came to be regarded as gospel truth."

"Aristotelian physics is really a pseudo-science, out of which not a single discovery, invention or new insight has come in two thousand years; nor could it ever come ..."

"Cooper, you are so naïve. We don't have to do art; that's what the French are for."

"Art is not for people who want to make the world holy."

"Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream inside him wanting to get out in a special way."

"To paint what we see before us is a different matter from painting what we see within."

"I'm an actor and that means I accept almost anything as art. I'm a writer and that means that I think art raises the human spirit."

"I hate all Boets and Bainters."

"I could only trust in the blue-highway maxim: 'I cant take any more' comes just before 'I don't give a damn.' Let the caring snap, let it break all to hell. Caring breaks before the man if he can only wait it out."

"It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing."

"The only difficulty was that I was rated as sassy. I just had to talk back to established authority and that established authority hated back-talk worse than barbed-wire pie."

"Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes our lives less miserable so that we might be more kind -- well, then, let's have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories. We are a sorry tribe of beasts. We need all the help we can get."

"While she may have had a heart of gold, the thing you noticed about her first was that she had a tooth of gold."

"Nothing is beautiful from every point of view."

"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children, in fact, barely presentable."

"After the Bible was translated into English every man, nay, every boy and wench that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he said."

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

"The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed."

"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

"Lord, I ascribe it to Thy grace,
   And not to chance, as others do,
That I was born of Christian race,
   and not a heathen, or a Jew."

"Never, never call anyone out of their name, never. Always respect others. Never use a term like that again in your life."

"Never, never use a term like that about a human being. Never in your life, never, never, never."

"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of an eye: the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract."

"We recognize in books what we've met in life. But if you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You'd see a few things coming."

"I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on."

"'Couldn't put it down,' I said, cunningly not revealing that I hadn't been able to take it up."

"A book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out."

"Bookes give not wisdom where none was before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more."

"If we admire a book, we like to own it, and we like to have it at hand whenever we want it."

"There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature."

"I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation."

"I was curled up with a Goldenberg Delicious Peanut Chew and a novel that was a best-seller three years ago. (I may read rubbish, but I'm in no hurry about it.)"

"What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books."

"A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again."

"Every hour has been agony, but I could not have done otherwise."

"'After seven years they can't get you for anything,' Sylvie said, and seven years had passed, but we both knew they could always get you for increasingly erratic behavior."

"If I am not for myself, who is for me? and being for my own self what am I? If not now, when?"

"If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not be afraid of the critics outside you."

"You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, you are not trying."

"Unlike my mother, I didn't believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me."

"It is personality that counts. It was not the Christian Gospel but the Christian martyr that conquered the world, and the martyr derived his strength not from doctrine, but from the example of the Man on the Cross."

"If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race."

"Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies.
I will sleep with a clear conscience,
I will sleep in peace."

"A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities."

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself."

"How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole."

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form -- an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other."

"I had a feeling of difference from my fellow men, and I did not want it to be found out. Oh, how I cried out to be just as everybody else! But the voice said No. I must go where I was sent."

     "Aunt Greenow always seems to me to be a very good sort of woman.'
     "'She may be a good woman, but I must say I think she's of a bad sort.'"

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it sometimes."

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

"You're who you think you are, even if you never admit it to yourself or to anyone else. You may be in the worst position to judge, but you're in the best position to know."

"All my life I've always wanted to be somebody. But I see now I should have been more specific."

"Why shouldn't she arrange the world to suit herself? Wouldn't we all, if we could?"

"I had become a stranger to their world and remote from it. Although I could see that it was exactly the same as it had been before and therefore familiar to me, I was still a stranger there. Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it."

"There's no use asking more questions. If you ask a question they tell you it's a mystery, you'll understand when you grow up, be a good boy, ask your mother, ask your father, for the love 'o Jesus leave me alone, go out and play."

"A strange child, perhaps, but I wouldn't give a pinch of dust for a child who was not strange."

"No one gains the complete confidence of a clever child without in some way deserving it."

"I simply am not interested in Bridget's children. Do grasp that."

"Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except 'Do you have enough room in the toes?'"

"But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children's faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours."

"Some children are just bound to take after their fathers in spite of women's prayers."

"I do read in the textbooks that even an occasional spanking tends to make a child feel insecure. This may be so. On the other hand, if a child really needs a whacking and doesn't get it, I feel very insecure."

"We protect children because they have not yet proven themselves to be hamstrung shitholes. Granted, the odds are lousy that they'll turn out any other way, but it's been known to happen."

"Show her a child who has never rebelled against becoming civilized, and she will show you a child who isn't smart enough to realize what these people are trying to do to him."

"God plagues the mothers of the world with worry, from His own sweet Mary to the meanest fishwife of the harborside!"

"Fundamentally, Christianity teaches that there is an unbridgeable gulf between humanity and God for, even if one is taken into His grace, a human being can never actually become God or His equal."

"You will remember that He said, 'Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' This is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense."

"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world."

"Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these points."

"It it weren't for Christians, I'd be a Christian."

"Christianity has had a two-thousand-year run, and it's over."

"I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution."

"A man is accepted into church for what he believes�and turned out for what he knows."

"I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."

"The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one."