The Moon And Sixpence Quotes
"The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic."
"To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist."
"The faculty for myth is innate in the human race."
"Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand."
"The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex."
"I should be sorry to think that there was nothing between Anthony and Cleopatra but an economic situation."
"The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work."
"There is no last word. The new evangel was old when Nineveh reared her greatness to the sky."
"The artist has this advantage over the rest of the world, that his friends offer not only their appearance and their character to his satire, but also their work."
"I love her so much better than myself. It seems to me that when vanity comes into love it can only be because really you love yourself best."
"Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passerby to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul."
"I couldn’t expect her to love me as I loved her. I’m a buffoon. I’m not the sort of man that women love."
"The only thing that matters is the everlasting present."
"Do you know, I’ve been comforting myself by thinking that however long it lasted he’d want me at the end?"
"I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the deathbed of those they love."
"I thought it as well then to say what Strickland had suggested."
"I had again the feeling that he was possessed of a devil; but you could not say that it was a devil of evil, for it was a primitive force that existed before good and ill."
"I’m frightened of him. I don’t know why, but there’s something in him that terrifies me."
"It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his friends’ confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim at the cost of another’s misery."
"Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realize that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality."
"What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness of the universe."
"There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation."
"The false emphasis with which they try to deck their worthless thoughts blunts their susceptibilities."
"We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them."
"It seems that my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality."
"He gave a sudden flash of anger. 'Damn it all, I wanted her.'"
"The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble."
"A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her," he said, "but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account."
"I have tried to put some connection into the various things Captain Nichols told me about Strickland, and I here set them down in the best order I can."
"How he had passed the intervening months I do not know, but life must have been very hard, for Captain Nichols saw him first in the Asile de Nuit."
"The Asile de Nuit is a large stone building where pauper and vagabond may get a bed for a week, provided their papers are in order and they can persuade the friars in charge that they are workingmen."
"Captain Nichols noticed Strickland for his size and his singular appearance among the crowd that waited for the doors to open."
"I recognised my friend’s limited vocabulary, and I prepared to regard Captain Nichols as a trustworthy witness."
"I received the impression of a life intense and brutal, savage, multicoloured, and vivacious."
"I envied men who had seen with their own eyes the sights that Captain Nichols described."
"For all I know, this picture may still adorn the parlour of the tumbledown little house somewhere near the Quai de la Joliette, and I suppose it could now be sold for fifteen hundred pounds."
"I suppose that he clung to Captain Nichols because he was acquainted with those parts, and it was Captain Nichols who persuaded him that he would be more comfortable in Tahiti."
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place."
"Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history."
"Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves."
"I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual."
"I do not think he was any gentler here, less selfish or less brutal, but the circumstances were more favourable."
"There’s a certain responsibility about having been the wife of a genius."