You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That's because war is unreal.

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them.

It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction.

He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.