If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat.
Alone with the cat in the room where you work... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp...
The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding.
And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost.
You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden. If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians. She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one's capacity for forming true ones. The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead.
It means a leading out.
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full. It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life. It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls. "How do you know when you're in love?" she said.
"The traffic improves and the cost of living seems very low." Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance. I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't. I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third. You don't know what it's like trying to eat enough to live on and at the same time avoid fats and carbohydrates. It was a gusty day, and from the windows of Caroline's top-floor flat, only the sky was visible with its little hurrying clouds. It was a day when being indoors was meaningful, wasting an afternoon in superior confidences with a friend before the two-barred electric heater. Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce... Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic. Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning. The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education. When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality. Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield. You're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles. Beware the ire of the calm. Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great. "Sandwiches", she said, "like diamonds, are forever". She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can.