Great Throughts Treasury

"Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense."

"Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want."

"Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back."

"When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home."

"Where there is an unknowable there is a promise."

"Whenever you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense."

"Yes. Now you know. Now you know. That's what it was to be alive, to move about in a cloud of ignorance, to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those-- of those about you, to spend and waste time as if you had a million years, to be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Now you know, that's the 'happy' existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness."

"You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever."

"You have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life"