William John Locke quotes:

Any human love a man gets he can make fill his life. It's like the grain of mustard-seed.

Every man's first declaration of love is bathos--the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence.

Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.

If you love a Dream Woman ... let her stay the divine Woman of the Dream. To awaken and clasp flesh and blood, no matter how delicately tender, and find that love has sped at the dawn is a misery too deep for tears.

Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.

Our happiness is made up of the things we miss.

Sex is the ... tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition ... generally known as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater percent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance.

The measure of my success is the measure of my happiness.

To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another.

Women are women and can't help themselves.

You have never seen ugliness in a happy face.

Children are the root of all evil.... Happy the man who has his quiver empty.

Women are cats ... and love to scratch even those they're fond of. Sometimes the more they love them the harder they scratch.

Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.

As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years.

Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity.

Don't be a genius, my son, it isn't good for anybody.

Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly-bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?

I believe half of the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things.

I can tell you how to get what you want: You've just got to keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eyes wander to right or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal.

I hold in my hands the very soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods?

I think love is serious. It's like an invention: sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet--and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping.

In France the men all live in cafes, the children are all put out to nurse, and the women, saving the respect of mademoiselle -- well, the less said about them the better.

It all depends whether hope is in front or behind you.

It is not cheerful for a girl to discover within twenty-four hours of her wedding that her husband is a hopeless drunkard, and to see him die of delirium tremens within six weeks. An experience so vivid, like lightning must blast something in a woman's conception of life. Because one man's kisses reeked of whisky the kisses of all male humanity were anathema.

Men are men and women are women. We've tried for tens of thousands of years to lay down hard and fast lines for the sexes to walk upon, and we've failed miserably.

No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.

The only cure for loss of illusions is fresh illusions, more illusions, and always illusions.

The only remedy against the malady of life is life itself. The bane is its own antidote.

What is a logical mind?... It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified.