A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth-I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
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I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
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It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
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One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
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People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
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The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
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The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
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The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
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The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy . what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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