Great Throughts Treasury

"Then listen! when this day is overpast, a fearful monster shall I be again, and thou mayst be my saviour at the last, unless, once more, thy words are nought and vain. If thou of love and sovereignty art fain, come thou next morn, and when thou seest here a hideous dragon, have thereof no fear, but take the loathsome head up in thine hands and kiss it, and be master presently of twice the wealth that is in all the lands from Cathay to the head of Italy; and master also, if it pleaseth thee, of all thou praisest as so fresh and bright, of what thou callest crown of all delight. Ah! with what joy then shall I see again the sunlight on the green grass and the trees, and hear the clatter of the summer rain, and see the joyous folk beyond the seas. Ah, me! to hold my child upon my knees after the weeping of unkindly tears and all the wrongs of these four hundred years. Go now, go quick! leave this grey heap of stone; and from thy glad heart think upon thy way, how I shall love thee — yea, love thee alone, that bringest me from dark death unto day; for this shall be thy wages and thy pay; unheard-of wealth, unheard-of love is near, if thou hast heart a little dread to bear."

"There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful."

"There sat a woman, whose wet tresses rolled on to the floor in waves of gleaming gold, cast back from such a form as, erewhile shown to one poor shepherd, lighted up Troy town."

"There was a knight came riding by in early spring, when the roads were dry and he heard that lady sing at the noon, two red roses across the moon."

"There were four of us about that bed the mass-priest knelt at the side, I and his mother stood at the head, over his feet lay the bride."

"Therefore, I bid you not dwell in hell but in heaven, or while ye must, upon earth, which is a part of heaven, and forsooth no foul part."

"This has sometimes appeared in paraphrased form as: "The aim of art is to destroy the curse of labor by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth the exercise"."

"Till the resting of hours: fresh are thy feet and with dreams thine eyes glistening."

"Thy still lips are sweet though the world is a-listening. O love, set a word in my mouth for our meeting, cast thine arms round about me to stay my heart's beating! O fresh day, o fair day, o long day made ours!"

"This land is a little land too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness."

"Till again shall the change come, and words your lips say not your hearts make all plain in the best wise they would and the world ye thought waning is glorious and good."

"To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it. Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labor mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind."

"To happy folk all heaviest words no more of meaning bear than far-off bells saddening the Summer air."

"To thee, when thou didst try to conceive of them, the ways of the days to come seemed follies scarce to be thought of; yet shall they come to be familiar things, and an order by which every man liveth, ill as he liveth, so that men shall deem of them, that thus it hath been since the beginning of the world, and that thus it shall be while the world endureth... Yet in time shall this also grow old, and doubt shall creep in, because men shall scarce be able to live by that order, and the complaint of the poor shall be hearkened, no longer as a tale not utterly grievous, but as a threat of ruin, and a fear. Then shall these things, which to thee seem follies, and to the men between thee and me mere wisdom and the bond of stability, seem follies once again; yet, whereas men have so long lived by them, they shall cling to them yet from blindness and from fear; and those that see, and that have thus much conquered fear that they are furthering the real time that cometh and not the dream that faileth, these men shall the blind and the fearful mock and missay, and torment and murder: and great and grievous shall be the strife in those days, and many the failures of the wise, and too oft sore shall be the despair of the valiant; and back-sliding, and doubt, and contest between friends and fellows lacking time in the hubbub to understand each other, shall grieve many hearts and hinder the Host of the Fellowship: yet shall all bring about the end, till thy deeming of folly and ours shall be one, and thy hope and our hope; and then — the Day will have come."

"Today it is prosperity that is externally ugly... we sit starving amidst our gold, the Midas of the Ages."

"Unless you have a certain amount of money you shall not be allowed the exercise of the social virtues : sentiment, affection, good manners, intelligence even, to you shall be mere words; you shall be less than men, because you are needed as machines."

"Upon the floor uncounted medals lay like things of little value; here and there stood golden caldrons, that might well outweigh the biggest midst an emperor's copper-ware, and golden cups were set on tables fair, themselves of gold; and in all hollow things were stored great gems, worthy the crowns of kings."

"Wert thou more fickle than the restless sea, still should I love thee, knowing thee for such."

"We are only the trustees for those who come after us."

"What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain¬slack brain workers, nor heart¬sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth."

"What business have we with art unless we can all share it?"

"What shall I say concerning its mastery of and its waste of mechanical power, its commonwealth so poor, its enemies of the commonwealth so rich, its stupendous organization — for the misery of life! Its contempt of simple pleasures which everyone could enjoy but for its folly? Its eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art, the one certain solace of labor? All this I felt then as now, but I did not know why it was so. The hope of the past times was gone, the struggles of mankind for many ages had produced nothing but this sordid, aimless, ugly confusion."

"What man art thou that thus hast wandered here, and found this lonely chamber where I dwell? Beware, beware! for I have many a spell; if greed of power and gold have led thee on, not lightly shall this untold wealth be won. But if thou com'st here knowing of my tale, in hope to bear away my body fair, stout must thine heart be, nor shall that avail if thou a wicked soul in thee dost bear; so once again I bid thee to beware, because no base man things like this may see, and live thereafter long and happily."

"What is this the sound and rumor What is this that all men hear, Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near, Like the rolling of the ocean in the eventide of fear 'Tis the people marching on"

"When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it. He must always be a stranger to the place he loves, and its people."

"When he understands, as few others do, something of his home that is funny, or sad, or tragic, or cruel, or beautiful, or true, he knows he must do so as a stranger."

"Wherewith will ye buy it, ye rich who behold me? Draw out from your coffers your rest and your laughter, and the fair gilded hope of the dawn coming after! Nay this i sell not, — though ye bought me and sold me, — for your house stored with such things from threshold to rafter. — pass by me, i hearken, and think of you not!"

"When I was journeying (in a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a clear-seen mediæval town standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old. All this I have seen in the dreams of the night clearer than I can force myself to see them in dreams of the day. So that it would have been nothing new to me the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were all, and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell me after I had fallen asleep."

"When we can get beyond that smoky world, there, out in the country we may still see the works of our fathers yet alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in the English country, in the days when people cared about such things, was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were made for: — the land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily- changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep- walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home."

"While Wood, who is 24, might be a much younger actor, he has nonetheless been making movies for 15 years and also possesses a canny sense of himself. Elijah didn't do 'The Lord of the Rings' to become a movie star, ... Nobody knew that it would be the amazing phenomenon that it turned out to be. He loved the books and did everything he could to get the part."

"Wilt thou not save me? once in every year this rightful form of mine that thou dost see by favour of the Goddess have I here from sunrise unto sunset given me, that some brave man may end my misery. And thou — art thou not brave? can thy heart fail, whose eyes e'en now are weeping at my tale?"

"Wind, wind thou art sad, art thou kind wind, wind, unhappy thou art blind, yet still thou wanderest the lily-seed to find."

"With no rest of the night; for i waked mid a story of a land wherein love is the light and the lord, where my tale shall be heard, and my wounds gain a glory, and my tears be a treasure to add to the hoard of pleasure laid up for his people's reward."

"With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on."

"Worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill. All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves' work — mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil."

"You may hang your walls with tapestry instead of whitewash or paper; or you may cover them with mosaic; or have them frescoed by a great painter: all this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty's sake, and not for show: it does not break our golden rule: Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

"Ye know not how void is your hope and your living: depart with your helping lest yet ye undo me! Ye know not that at nightfall she draweth near to me, there is soft speech between us and words of forgiving till in dead of the midnight her kisses thrill through me. — pass by me and harken, and waken me not!"