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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town.
I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked:
the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
“Why do nice women marry dull men?” “Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.”
I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.
Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.
“I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”
live for the moments
He was a bad winner and a good loser. Those who think that a man betrays his character nowhere more clearly than when he is playing a game might on this draw subtle inferences. When he had finished I called the waiter to pay for the drinks, and left them.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
“A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her,” he said, “but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.”
Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence. I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride.
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step.
If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig-tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all this, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.
faith and belief ..
whenever you got your way you wished afterwards that you hadn’t.
dichotomy ...
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for ME, and it becomes part of me; I’ve got out of the book all that’s any use to me, and I can’t get anything more if I read it a dozen times.
‘We should look for knowledge where we may expect to find it, and why should a man be despised who goes in search of it? Those who remain at home may grow richer and live more comfortably than those who wander; but I desire neither to live comfortably nor to grow rich.’
words of wisdom ...
“Entre deux amants il-y-a toujours un qui aime, et un qui se laisse aimer.”
Truth ocf life...
“Celui qui aime a toujours tort.”
love
“Life is short, but let me live before I die!”‘
love love love...
