Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

An answer is always a form of death.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes chess made flesh a mixture of proud chivalry and base in both senses greed.

To write poetry and to commit suicide apparently so contradictory had really been the same attempts at escape.

There are two kinds of hangover in one you feel ill and incapable in the other you feel ill and lucid.

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

Last year, the Assembly of the League, as a result of the initiative taken by the Scandinavian nations, further limited and clarified all the provisions of the clause prescribing the duty of states to participate in sanctions.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Let everyone regulate his conduct... by the golden rule of doing to others as in similar circumstances we would have them do to us, and the path of duty will be clear before him.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.

To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Every Christian will allow that sin is an evil, and that it is our duty not to commit sin.

Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it.

Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.

Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.

Spreading the news is your duty as a Christian, and there are many ways to do this.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.