We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.
It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.