Intelligent Quotes

“Every day above earth is a good day.”

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.”

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one.”

“Now when a country does not pay its debts you cannot take its word on anything.”

“My God what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her?”

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of this war is that way.”

“No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.”

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.”

“War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”

“Are you a communist?”
“No, I am an anti-fascist.”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”

“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés”

“Wine is a grand thing,” I said. “It makes you forget all the bad.”

’I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing”

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”

“This is a good place,” he said.
“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.

“I’m not unfaithful, darling. I’ve plenty of faults but I’m very faithful. You’ll be sick of me I’ll be so faithful.”

“Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.”

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

“There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.”

“Grace under pressure.”

“You know I don’t love any one but you. You shouldn’t mind because some one else loved me.”

“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”

“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”

“It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.”

“You ought to dream. All our biggest business men have been dreamers.”

“But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.”

“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”

“That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here.”

“There isn’t always an explanation for everything.”

“Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry.”

“But are there not many fascists in your country?”
“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.”
“But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?”
“No,” Robert Jordan said. “We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.”

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”

“And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

“He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.”

“Spanish girls make wonderful wives. I’ve never had one so I know.”

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”

“Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.”

“I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.”

”You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.”

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

“I wish we had horses to ride,” Maria said. “In my happiness I would like to be on a good horse and ride fast with thee riding fast beside me and we would ride faster and faster, galloping, and never pass my happiness.”

“You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war.”

“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

“In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone.”

“I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”

“I am always in love.”

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

“The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.”

“Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.”

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”

“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.”

“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren’t with me I haven’t a thing in the world.”

“I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”

“Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.”

“This is a hell of a dull talk,” Brett said. “How about some of that champagne?”

“If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”

“I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into.”

“I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.”

“I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing.”

“I may not be as strong as I think. But I know many tricks and I have resolution.”

“There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”

“Where should we go? I don’t care. Anywhere you want. Anywhere we don’t know people.”

“In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.”

“You had to trust the people you worked with completely or not at all, and you had to make decisions about the trusting.”

“Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

“You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. It you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?”

“He killed more people than the cholera”

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”

“No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

“It is a good thing to have a brave man [JFK] as our President in times as tough as these are for our country and the world.”

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”

“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

“It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

“No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”

“Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.”

“Good. I go. And if thou dost not love me, I love thee enough for both.”

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.”

“I have no luck anymore. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”

“Work could cure almost anything.”

“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”