Great Throughts Treasury

"I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything."

"If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot."

"If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living."

"If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men."

"If you have time you can obtain money?usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has."

"If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence."

"If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost."

"Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry."

"In search of ideas I spent yesterday morning in walking about, and went to the stores and bought things in four departments. A wonderful and delightful way of spending time. I think this sort of activity does stimulate creative ideas."

"In the majority of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines while he is engaged in his business are seldom at their full h.p."

"It is a fine thing to be a walking encyclopaedia of philosophy, but if you happen to have no liking for philosophy, and to have a like for the natural history of street-cries, much better leave philosophy alone, and take to street-cries."

"It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made --- so faithful is the public."

"It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top."

"It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality."

"It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable."

"Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate."

"Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause."

"Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true."

"Just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure."

"Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence."

"Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely"

"Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it's a good investment."

"Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges the value, and which only the most sagacious put into practice. I don't know why."

"Meat may go up in price ? it has done ? but books won?t. Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will remain quite low. The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of kisses ? these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of stock exchanges."

"Mind control is the first element of a full existence."

"Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is."

"Most people sleep themselves stupid."

"Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much."

"Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like."

"Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity."

"Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain."

"Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice."

"None of us has not been saying to himself all his life: I shall alter that when I have a little more time? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is."

"Not one of us has not been saying to himself all his life: I shall alter that when I have a little more time? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is."

"Nothing is humdrum."

"Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality."

"Of course it is impossible, or at any rate very difficult, properly to study anything whatever without the aid of printed books. But if you desire to understand the deeper depths of bridge or of boat-sailing you would not be deterred by your lack of interest in literature from reading the best books on bridge or boat-sailing. We must, therefore, distinguish between literature, and books treating of subjects not literary."

"One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep."

"One-act [plays] are not strikingly remunerative, but, on the other hand, the veriest dullard could not spend more than a week in writing one."

"Only people, especially Anglo-Saxons, are so afraid lest joyfulness may somehow be reprehensible that they will never admit it as a lawful and laudable end in itself."

"Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul."

"Novels are excluded from 'serious reading,' so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious-some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction-the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel."

"Now a prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom. A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humor. A prig is a tedious individual who, having made a discovery, is so impressed by his discovery that he is capable of being gravely displeased because the entire world is not also impressed by it. Unconsciously to become a prig is an easy and a fatal thing."

"Now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have more time, since you already have all the time there is?"

"Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time."

"Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live."

"Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan."

"Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which you can't tell what is going to happen next. But in some of the most tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next."

"Some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the"

"Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism."