on behalf of the author – Character Quotes

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed.
Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Anything would be better than this dreadful state of doubt.

But I, alas, do not know how to see sheep through the walls of boxes. Perhaps I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old.

How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

The life that was to make his soul would mar his body.

A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.

The flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years.
For millions of years the sheep have been eating them just the same.

There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.