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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I may as well tell you now, darling, that I don't intend to lose you to an old roué like Balthazar Lebeau." "Well, after all, half the women in London have been in love with him at one time or another," I teased. "What qualities, might I ask, does he have that I haven't?" I considered. "You both have dark, good looks and very blue eyes. You both know the right things to say at the right time. You both know just the right way to hold a woman in your arms." "I see I shall have to keep you away from him in the future. Or perhaps the more dramatic solution would be best? We'll go about things the way Armand and Durant might have—pistols at dawn!" "Nonsense," I said, recovering my equilibrium. "You'd never get up so early in the morning!" "To fight for you, I would," he replied.”

“I may be a bigot, I may be a pedant' but I believe I have the ordinary Englishman with me here. He does not want 'religion'; he wants God. And if you tell him that he knows God by an intuitive perception, you will only make him unhappy. He is fully conscious that the word came into his vocabulary when he was a child, when he was accustomed to accept from his elders a multitude of traditions, some of which his riper mind has discarded; that he has lived with the idea and grown accustomed to it, that it has formed part of a fairyland which he would like to find true. Precisely for that reason, he distrusts the sentiment; he suspects himself of fostering a grateful illusion, suspects that the wish was father to the thought. The notion of God fits in with his higher ideals, with his dearer hopes; all the more reason to surmise that it has been coined, by successive ages of mythology, for that purpose. The very reason why you ask him to believe in God, namely, that he wants to believe in God, is his main reason for doubting. The elders, when they heard Helen plead, made allowances for the beauty of her voice, lest they should be spellbound by its influence; what if this hope, too, should be an illusion of the Sirens? The Englishman wants truth of fact; you will not get him to replace it by artistic values. The pressure of fact is all around him, reflected in the daily urgency of living; you must give him a metaphysic of fact, for the alternative is despair.”

“I may be a descendant of Seth. I say to myself, What does [the story of Cain and Abel] teach me? So I go back to all the interpretations in the Talmud, which to me are a source of pleasure and joy. Then I say, maybe this story is not for then; maybe it's for now! It's possible for brothers to kill one another in civil wars. But most important, whoever kills, kills his brother. That's a moral conclusion that may not be there; but that must be my conclusion. Otherwise, why read it? Whoever kills, kills his brother.”