Muriel Spark
Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.Collection: Time
Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.Collection: Parenting
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion.Collection: Education
It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.Collection: Love
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.Collection: Smile
When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.Collection: Age
All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.
Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.
One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.
If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.
One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.
I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.
I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.
She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.Collection: Persons
If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.Collection: Art
Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.Collection: Weapons
A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.Collection: Tyrants
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.Collection: Death
From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be: 'Beware of any man bringing flowers.Collection: Believe
Beware the ire of the calm.Collection: Calm
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.Collection: Teacher
everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.Collection: Artist
I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.Collection: Country
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.Collection: Art
You look for one thing and you find another.Collection: Looks
Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.Collection: Mind
If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .Collection: Cat
It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.Collection: White
Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.Collection: Being In Love
The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.Collection: Happiness
Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes.Collection: Character
If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding.Collection: Writing
It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.Collection: Rain
It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.Collection: Girl
People who quoted the Scriptures in criticism of others were terrible bores and usually they misapplied the text. One could prove anything against anyone from the Bible.Collection: Bible
Goodness, Truth and Beauty come firstCollection: Firsts
I have a great desire to make people smile - not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.Collection: Laughter
Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.Collection: Singing
Interviews can be stimulating. It depends on the intelligence of the interviewer.Collection: Interviews
Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.Collection: Home
Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.Collection: Death
Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.Collection: Virtue
Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in greatCollection: Perseverance
I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.Collection: Friendship
No medicine man these days can afford to be without a portable tape recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influenece of modern skepticism.Collection: Technology
sooner or later I do what I want to do.Collection: Want
I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.Collection: Years
Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.Collection: Girl
Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis.Collection: Personality