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It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.
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The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
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It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
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Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.
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The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
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Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.
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Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.
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Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.
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Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
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If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.
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There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
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The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
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The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
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Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
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Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.
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The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
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The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
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We must all share in the evils of the world or move to another planet.
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I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.
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Virtue is insufficient temptation.
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The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
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I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.
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Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
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The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.