Back to Methuselah

I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.

Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.

Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes illness worth while.

Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

I make no vows. I take my chance. ... It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

: The voice in the garden is your own voice.

: It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.

: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.

[throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word —

: Love. Love. Love.

: That is too short a word for so long a thing.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.