E-text prepared by Marc D'Hooghe
(http://www.freeliterature.org)
(Miscellaneous aphorisms, followed by The Soul of Man.)
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
Women are made to be loved, not to be understood.
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read andwhat one shouldn't. Moren than half of modern culture depends on whatone shouldn't read.
Women, as someone says, love with their ears, just as men love withtheir eyes, if they ever love at all.
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to begood than to be ugly.
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
Misfortunes one can endure, they come from outside, they are accidents.But to suffer for one's faults—ah! there is the sting of life.
Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall awaylike sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy forall seasons, a possession for all eternity.
Questions are never indiscreet; answers sometimes are.
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty yearsof marriage make her something like a public building.
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that itchanges.
Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires avery fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others tolive as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people'slives alone, not interfering with them.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Nowadays people seem to look on life as a speculation. It is not aspeculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification issacrifice.
In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbour. Infact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessivelyvulgar and middle class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality,everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and allthe other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go overlike ninepins—one after the other.
All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least finemode.
If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If youpretend to be bad it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity ofoptimism.
It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to hiswife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her whenthey're alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that lookslike a happy married life.
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear intragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh orshed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women areforced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The worldis a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Men know life too early; women know life too late-that is the differencebetween men and women.
He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, andthat is not being talked about.
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nervesand fibres and slowly built-up cells, in which thought hides itself andpassion has its dreams.
Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensat