Love is absorbing;
It takes the lover out of himself;
The most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease;
It gives body to what he knows is an illusion, and knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.
It makes a man a little more than himself and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego.
Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality.
He was a bad winner and a good lose. Those who think that a man betrays his character nowhere more clearly than when he is playing a game might on this draw subtle inferences.
You must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.
It gave me a sudden wrench of the heart-strings.
Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father's steps, and look neither to the right or to the left.
"The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows wither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. Tha is the wisdom of life." - It was his broken spirit that expressed itself, and I rebelled against his renunciation. But I kept my own counsel.
- "Now that you know what art can offer, would you change your life? Would you have missed all the delight it has given you?"
- "Art is the greatest thing in the world."
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long but men only at times.
"undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy"
If in the loneliness of his studio he wrestled desperately with the Angel of the Lord he never allowed a soul to divine his anguish.
Who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.
For in men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.
Perhaps both were trying to put down in paint ideas which were more suitable to literature.
Gray clouds chased one another across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breath is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected.
The beauty of the island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as you sail by, and darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself together in a stony, inaccessible grimness.
Nothing met your gaze but the blue loneliness of the Pacific.
For Tahiti is smiling and friendly, it is like a lovely woman graciously prodigal of her charm and beauty; and nothing can be more conciliatory than the entrance into the harbour at Papeete.
The schooners moored to the quay are trim and neat, the little town along the bay is white and urbane, and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt their colour like a cry of passion.
