Lyndsy Spence > Lyndsy's Quotes

“One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.
Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife. ”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
― Nicholas Klein

“Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Oh, the spectacles - I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“Strange how potent cheap music is.”
― Noel Coward, Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?”
― William Somerset Maugham

“I'd sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Christmas Holiday

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die.”
― Petronius, The Satyricon and The Apocolocyntosis of the Divine Claudius

“[Jean Harlow] 'Say - aren't you Margot Asquith?' (pronouncing the hard 't')
[Margot Asquith] 'Yes Dear, But the 't' is silent, as in Harlow.”
― Margot Asquith

“However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”
― Maya Angelou