Great Throughts Treasury

"Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens, and that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons."

"Leave the earth to the strong and athletic, and the sea to adventure upon. But the sun and the sand no contractor can copy; we lie in the land of the lotus and poppy; we vegetate, calm and aesthetic, on the beach, on the sand, in the sun."

"Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor."

"Life has a tendency to obfuscate and bewilder, such as fating us to spend the first part of our lives being embarrassed by our parents and the last part being embarrassed by our childer."

"Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was."

"Listen, buds, it's March twenty first; don't you know enough to burst? Come on, birds, unlock your throats! Come on, gardeners, shed your coats!"

"Love is a word that is constantly heard, hate is a word that is not. Love, I am told, is more precious that gold. Love, I have read, is hot. But hate is the verb that to me is superb, and love but a drug on the mart. Any kiddie in school can love like a fool, but hating, my boy, is an art."

"Malt does more than Hubbard did to help us look into the Id."

"Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who cannot sleep with window shut, and a woman who cannot sleep with the window open."

"May I join you in the doghouse, Rover?"

"Maybe I couldn't be dafter, but I keep wondering if this time we settle our differences before a war instead of after."

"Miranda in Miranda's sight i Is old and gray and dirty; twenty-nine she was last night; this morning she is thirty."

"Middle age is when you have met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else and usually is."

"Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you."

"Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it."

"My garden will never make me famous. I'm a horticultural ignoramus. I can't tell a string-bean from a soybean, or even a girl bean from a boy bean."

"My fellow man I do not care for. I often ask me, ?What's he there for?? The only answer I can find is, reproduction of his kind."

"Most bankers dwell in marble halls, which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals, and particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it, which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don't need it."

"My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky; contrariwise, my blood runs cold when little boys go by. For little boys as little boys, no special hate I carry, but now and then they grow to men, and when they do, they marry. No matter how they tarry, eventually they marry. And, swine among the pearls, they marry little girls."

"My verse represents a handle I can grasp in order not to yield to the centrifugal forces which are trying to throw me off of the world."

"No, I object to one kind of apology alone,"

"Naturally I am not pointing a finger at me, but I must admit that I find Mr. Ickes or any other speaker far more convincing when I agree with him than when I disagree."

"No matter how deep and dark your pit, how dank your shroud, their heads are heroically unbloody and unbowed."

"Now, anybody whom a German hates, He presently exterminates, But he who exterminates a French Is never safe from Gallic revenge, But he who gets even with a German Is obliterated like a vermin."

"O all ye exorcizers come and exorcize now, and ye clergymen draw nigh and clerge, for I wish to be purged of an urge. It is an irksome urge, compounded of nettles and glue, and it is turning all my friends back into acquaintances, and all my acquaintances into people who look the other way when I heave into view."

"O Adolescence, O Adolescence I wince before thine incandescence . . . When anxious elders swarm about crying "Where are you going?", thou answerest "Out," . . . Strewn! All is lost and nothing found Lord, how thou leavest things around!"

"No, you never get any fun out of the things you haven't done."

"Nothing there but basketball, a game which won?t be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo."

"Now the name of the little black kitten was Ink, and the little gray mouse, she called him Blink, and the little yellow dog was sharp as Mustard, but the dragon was a coward, and she called him Custard."

"O Duty, why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie? Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously? Why art thou clad so abominously?"

"Oh, Night will not see thirty again, yet soft her wing, Miranda; pick up your glass and tell me, then ? How old is Spring, Miranda?"

"O misery, misery, mumble and moan! Someone invented the telephone, and interrupted a nation's slumbers, ringing wrong but similar numbers."

"Oh, than to enjoy a storm like this there's nothing I would rather, don't dive between the blankets, Miss! or else leave room for Father."

"Once in a night as black as pitch Isabel met a wicked old witch. the witch's face was cross and wrinkled, the witch's gums with teeth were sprinkled.Ho, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed,I'll turn you into an ugly toad!"

"One would be in less danger from the wiles of the stranger If one's own kin and kith were more fun to be with."

"One bliss for which there is no match is when you itch to up and scratch."

"Parsley is gharsley."

"Passivity can be a provoking modus operandi; consider the Empire and Gandhi."

"Other people, and it doesn't matter if they are Scandinavians or Celts, think that anything is better than theirs just because it belongs to somebody else."

"Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore. Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for."

"People expect old men to die, they do not really mourn old men. Old men are different. People look at them with eyes that wonder when... People watch with unshocked eyes; but the old men know when an old man dies."

"People can't concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December."

"Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance."

"Perhaps indeed the possession of wealth is constantly distressing, but I should be quite willing to assume every curse of wealth if I could at the same time assume every blessing. The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure, which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor. Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won't buy, but it's very funny ? have you ever tried to buy them without money?"

"People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it, and I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it. I don?t mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it, but I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it."

"Pretty Halcyon Days - How pleasant to sit on the beach, on the beach, on the sand, in the sun, with ocean galore within reach, and nothing at all to be done!"

"Progress is a fine thing, but it's gone on long enough."

"Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or produceful."

"Progress may have been all right once, but it has gone on too long"

"Professional men, they have no cares; whatever happens, they get theirs."