Rebecca West
Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.Collection: Men
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.Collection: Animal
But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.Collection: Book
Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.Collection: People
A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.Collection: Causes
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.Collection: Art
Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.Collection: Daughter
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.Collection: Future
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.Collection: Law
The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.Collection: Adventure
art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.Collection: Art
The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.Collection: Survival
Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.Collection: Civilization
The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.Collection: Grace
If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.Collection: Kissing
She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.Collection: Doctors
Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.Collection: Laughing
Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.Collection: Gambling
There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.Collection: Art
The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.Collection: Routine
I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.Collection: Piano
It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.Collection: Agony
It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.Collection: Writing
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.Collection: Hands
Unhappy people are dangerous.Collection: People
I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.Collection: Blessing
Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.Collection: Males
I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.Collection: Writing
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.Collection: People
Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.Collection: Body
Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.Collection: Mom
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.Collection: Pain
the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.Collection: Art
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.Collection: Fighting
The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.Collection: Law
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.Collection: Rivers
We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.Collection: Thinking
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'Collection: Time
... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.Collection: Believe
Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.Collection: Music
I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.Collection: Children
Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.Collection: Secret
I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.Collection: Father
His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.Collection: Real
Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.Collection: Music
I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.Collection: Thinking
Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.Collection: Real
If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.Collection: Age
domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.Collection: Intellectual