William McFee Quotes

“There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.”

— William McFee

“One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.”

— William McFee

“Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.”

— William McFee

“If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.”

— William McFee

“It is so much easier to tell intimate things in the dark.”

— William McFee

“A young man must let his ideas grow, not be continually rooting them up to see how they are getting on.”

— William McFee

“Fear, born of that stern matron, Responsibility.”

— William McFee

“Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!”

— William McFee

“The world is not interested in the storms you encountered, but did you bring in the ship?”

— William McFee

“The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.”

— William McFee

“It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.”

— William McFee

“Wives invariably flourish when deserted; ... it is the deserting male, the reckless idealist rushing about the world seeking a non-existent felicity, who often ends in disaster.”

— William McFee

“Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight.”

— William McFee

“There is a pleasure unknown to the landsman in reading at sea.”

— William McFee

“Woman dwell always in the palace of unpalatable truth and never by any chance is there a magic talisman to save them from their destiny. Speech is their ultimate need. We men exist for them only in so far as we can be described.”

— William McFee

The artist isn't particularly keen on getting a thing done, as you call it. He gets his pleasure out of doing it, playing with it, fooling with it, if you like. The mere completion of it is an incident.

— William McFee

“There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.”

— William McFee

“There is far too much talk of love and grief benumbing the faculties, turning the hair gray, and destroying a man's interest in his work. Grief has made many a man look younger.”

— William McFee

“It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life.”

— William McFee

“The wives who are not deserted, but who have to feed and clothe and comfort and scold and advise, are the true objects of commiseration; wives whose existence is given over to a ceaseless vigil of cantankerous affection.”

— William McFee

“The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation that cancels out without warning when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.”

— William McFee

“An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?”

— William McFee

“There is nothing like a start, and being born, however pessimistic one may become in later years, is undeniably a start.”

— William McFee

Fear, born of the stern matron Responsibility, sits on one's shoulders like some heavy imp of darkness, and one is preoccupied and, possibly, cantankerous.

— William McFee

“The artist in his teens who is happy is a charlatan. Life comes bursting in all around lis too suddenly, too crudely, too cruelly, for happiness.”

— William McFee

“A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.”

— William McFee

People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right, writes no guarantee against misfortune.

— William McFee