Great Throughts Treasury

"Block City - What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, but I can be happy and building at home. Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea, there I'll establish a city for me: a kirk and a mill and a palace beside, and a harbor as well where my vessels may ride. Great is the palace with pillar and wall, a sort of a tower on top of it all, and steps coming down in an orderly way to where my toy vessels lie safe in the bay. This one is sailing and that one is moored: Hark to the song of the sailors on board! And see on the steps of my palace, the kings coming and going with presents and things!"

"Both my natures were completely spontaneous."

"Bright is the ring of words when the right man rings them."

"But a word once spoken who can recapture it?"

"But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table, this philosophy would meet with some rude knocks."

"But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself."

"But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. 'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way."

"But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit."

"But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!"

"But now that was all gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and juggle for a slice of heaven."

"But of works of art little can be said."

"But that in case of Dr. Jekyll's disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months, the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctor's household"

"But the love he feels towards Hyde of life is wonderful; tell you more: whenever I, who only think I feel faint and I feel my blood get ice, I recall the abjection and passion that binds him to life when I realize how much fear the power that I have to cut the their adherence to it through suicide, I feel, deep in my heart, to have pity for him."

"But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable."

"But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbors joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed."

"But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honor, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies."

"But what is the black spot, captain?"

"But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted, mostly--and woke up again, and here I were."

"By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honor useful labor. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind."

"By the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang."

"By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle."

"By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly. I had no care of my life, neither past nor future, and I scarce remembered there was such a lad as David Balfour. I did not think of myself, but just of each fresh step which I was sure would be my last, with despair?and of Alan, who was the cause of it, with hatred. Alan was in the right trade as a soldier; this is the officer's part to make men continue to do things, they know not wherefore, and when, if the choice was offered, they would lie down where they were and be killed. And I dare say I would have made a good enough private; for in these last hours it never occurred to me that I had any choice but just to obey as long as I was able, and die obeying."

"Call up your vermin to your back, sir, and fall on! The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye'll taste this steel throughout your vitals."

"Calm mind cannot be confused or frightened by the windfall want any disaster. Calm mind will continue to run according to their own rhythm, such as when the second bell in a raging storm."

"Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago have sacrificed that last possession: but the demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he could not exchange against a meal had often consoled him in his hunger. He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the old calaboose, seeking favorite passages and finding new ones only less beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. The Ebb-Tide"

"Children, you are very little, and your bones are very brittle."

"Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous stream of life."

"Come, come, Cap?n, be just, returned the other. There?s no call to be angry with me in earnest. I?m on?y a chara?ter in a sea story. I don?t really exist."

"Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer."

"Courage is the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand."

"Curiosity and timidity fought a long battle in his heart."

"Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair Who glory to have thrown in air, High over arm, the trembling reed, By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed."

"Dead men don't bite."

"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door; smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shore where neither piping bird nor peeping dawn disturbs the eternal sleep, but in the stillness far withdrawn our dreamless rest for evermore we keep."

"Do you know Poole, he said, looking up, that you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?"

"Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker."

"Doctors is all swabs...and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes ? what do the doctor know of lands like that? ? and I lived on rum, I tell you."

"Don t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."

"Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?"

"Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal."

"Even I, who had the tide going out and in before me in the bay, and even watched for the ebbs, the better to get my shellfish -- even I (I say) if I had sat down to think, instead of raging at my fate, must have soon guessed the secret, and got free. It was no wonder the fishers had not understood me. The wonder was rather that they had ever guessed my pitiful illusion, and taken the trouble to come back. I had starved with cold and hunger on that island for close upon one hundred hours. But for the fishers, I might have left my bones there, in pure folly. And even as it was, I had paid for it pretty dear, not only in past sufferings, but in my present case; being clothed like a beggar-man, scarce able to walk, and in great pain of my sore throat. I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first."

"Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week."

"Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it."

"Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind."

"Every man has a sane spot somewhere."

"Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort."

"Every night my prayers I say, and get my dinner every day, and every day that I've been good, I get an orange after food."

"Every one lives by selling something."

"Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences."

"Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name."