Women are used to worrying over trifles.Collection: Women
I'm an American. We've translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success - and that's getting Americanised.Collection: Equality
As I grow older, I think friendship between women is a thing to cherish.Collection: Friendship
There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.
Most of the people of this world are coated round and round with self-esteem, and they're afraid to admit any understanding of the things which aren't good.
We all have a fight - some an easy one, and some a big one, and if you have formed the idea that there is a kind of dividing line in the world, and that on the one side is the good, and on the other side the bad, why, all I can say is that you have a wrong notion of things.
I live by the sea, but the body of water I have the most feeling about is the Mississippi River, where I used to row and skate, ride on the ferry in childhood, watch the logs or just dream.
I would supplant the ox with the automobile and pave instead of plowing the fields. 1 have a theory that if a corn field were paved, leaving out a brick for each hill, it would increase the yield, do away entirely with the mud, and give the farmer plenty of time to meditate on lofty subjects. That is only one theory. I have many others.
Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs through a sort of side entrance over a saloon.
I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.
I am glad I worked on a newspaper because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or not.
I'm not sure I would be a good godmother. I have read about it, and I found that the godmother's position is to take care of the morals of the child. I don't know how good I would be at that.
Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.
I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?
We don't see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it. And because we don't care for some of them, we think we shouldn't care for it.
We all go through the same things - it's all just a different kind of the same thing.Collection: Different
In writing ... remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.Collection: War
It is through suppression that hells are formed in us.Collection: Denial
Those who never sail stormy waters are the quickest and harshest judges of bad seamanship.Collection: Water
To cease to love -- that is defeat.Collection: Defeat
Not having children makes less work-but it makes a quiet house.Collection: Inspirational
A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time.Collection: Time
Even though you've given up a past it hasn't given you up. It comes uninvited - and sometimes half welcome.Collection: Past
What we seek we do not find - that would be too trim and tidy for so reckless and opulent a thing as life. It is something else we find.Collection: Would Be
The only man who knows just what he thinks at the present moment is the man who hasn't done any new thinking in the past ten years.Collection: Knowledge
Hurts of childhood live on; in one form or other they are there to the end.Collection: Hurt
Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men.Collection: War
Resentment opens no door and breeds no courage.Collection: Doors
What is a clock? Something agreed upon and arbitrarily imposed upon us. Standard time. Not true time. Symbolizing the whole standardization of our lives.Collection: Time
What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.Collection: Past
Strength diminishes when it seems we are spending it in vain.Collection: Motivation
For nothing is so hard to hear as that which is half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one's self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.Collection: Self
I can't think of any sorrow in the world that a hot bath wouldn't help, just a little bit.Collection: Women
They made small effort to cover their raw souls with the mantle of commonplace words.Collection: Effort
Im an American. Weve translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success - and thats getting Americanised.Collection: Opportunity
The facts of another's life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life. Only the feeling that made the days can light them.Collection: Heart
There's one form of immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day.Collection: Thinking
... you can't put out a light just because it may light the wrong person.Collection: Light
That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.Collection: War
Some days are happy days - of themselves, as if for their own sakes. They seem to be enjoying themselves, regardless of what use may be made of them.Collection: Use