Great Throughts Treasury

"It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone."

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. "

"It is better a dish of illusion and a healthy appetite for life, than a feast of reality and indigestion there with."

"It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. "

"It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done."

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. "

"It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. "

"It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless."

"It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style."

"I've put my genius into my life; I've only put my talent into my works."

"It's always with the best intentions that the worst work is done."

"Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist. "

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship; and it is by far the best ending for one. "

"It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.]"

"Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

"Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations."

"Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. "

"Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams."

"Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose."

"Man is a rational [reasonable] animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. "

"Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree."

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

"Men always want to be a woman's first love. Women like to be a man's last romance."

"Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious, both are disappointed."

"Misfortunes one can endure, they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's faults - ah! there is this sting of life."

"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. "

"Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not. "

"Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. "

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. "

"Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life."

"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all."

"Music is the perfect type of art."

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance."

"Nature, whose sweet rains fall on just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole"

"No civilized man ever regrets a pleasure."

"No good deed goes unpunished. "

"Nothing is so aggravating as calmness."

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. "

"Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman."

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist."

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. "

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."

"One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. "

"One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour."

"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be. "

"One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. "

"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. "

"One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. "