Great Throughts Treasury

"Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!"

"Married women are kept women, and they are beginning to find it out."

"One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience."

"Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers."

"Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish."

"Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out."

"People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror."

"Retreat hell! We just got here!"

"Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them."

"Shopping: I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't want."

"Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income."

"Some people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

"Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches."

"Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it."

"The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatlyassists the circulation of their blood."

"The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought. That history would be a much simpler matter (and language, too, a much more precise instrument) if new thoughts on their appearance, and new facts at their discovery, could at once be analysed and explained and named with scientific precision. But even in science this seldom happens; we find rather that a whole complex group of facts, like those for instance of gas or electricity, are at first somewhat vaguely noticed, and are given, more or less by chance, a name like that of gas, which is an arbitrary formation, or that of electricity, which is derived from the attractive power of electrum or amber when rubbed ? the first electric phenomenon to be noticed."

"The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -- even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -- is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star."

"The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it."

"The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends."

"The newest books are those that never grow old."

"The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists."

"The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered."

"The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind."

"The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right."

"The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best. The complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought; and it is reached, as I have said, if indeed it is ever reached, by the preliminary processes of recognition, designation, and definition. It is with these preliminary processes that our aesthetic criticism is still occupied."

"The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses."

"The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.... To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober."

"Then I thought of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication."

"There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail."

"There are people who are beautiful in dilapidation, like old houses that were hideous when new."

"There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation."

"There are such astonishing things to be told about men and women, and hardly a man or woman to whom one dares to tell them."

"There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine."

"There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

"Those who are contemptuous of everyone are more than anyone terrified of contempt"

"Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God."

"Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side."

"To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment."

"To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?""

"To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave the way the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober."

"We need new friends. Some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact an ideal version of their lives."

"We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast."

"What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!"

"What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers."

"What is more enchanting than the voices of young people when you can't hear what they say."

"What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?"

"What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?"

"What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?"

"What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach."

"What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?"