I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!