Great Throughts Treasury

"Life is a predicament which precedes death."

"Life's too short for chess."

"Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong: beauty enchanting but rare, goodness very apt to be weak, folly very apt to be defiant, wickedness to carry the day, imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night, we wake up to it again for ever and ever, we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."

"Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare."

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?? I haven?t done so enough before?and now I'm too old; too old at any rate for what I see? What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that? Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don?t quite know which. Of course at present I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. ? Do what you like so long as you don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!"

"Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation."

"Love has nothing to do with good reasons."

"London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high."

"Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines."

"London is on the whole the most possible form of life."

"Madame Merle was very appreciative; she liked almost everything, including the English rain. There is always a little of it, and never too much at once, she said; and it never wets you, and it always smells good."

"Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures."

"Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications."

"Miss Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was interested in could have been carried on only by people she liked, and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's self--with internal convulsions, sacrifices, executions."

"Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole."

"Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet."

"Make up to a good one and marry here, and your life will become much more interesting."

"Most of the time they can get the loan, but it's not 100 percent. The owner usually has to come up with 35 to 40 percent of the money."

"Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,?a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman's own productions, and that his article proves very little more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr. Morris's poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne."

"Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number?a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them."

"My choice is the old world ? my choice, my need, my life."

"Much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton."

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart."

"My idea is this, that when you only love a little you?re naturally not jealous-or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn?t matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you?re in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all ? whey then you?re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down."

"My first impulse is always to behave, about everything, as if I feared complications. But I don't fear them? I really like them. They're quite my element."

"My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe. Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, My father's in Schenectady."

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire."

"No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools / no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class / no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life."

"Nevertheless, he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of Poughkeepsie."

"Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged."

"No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong."

"No, no?there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don?t know what I don?t see?what I don?t fear!"

"Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people."

"Observe perpetually!"

"Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes -- once they had gone a certain length -- that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love."

"Of his own death: So here it is at last, the distinguished thing."

"Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!"

"Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."

"Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test."

"On moonless nights, they would hide with lanterns to get boats to ram into barges so they could steal from the ships."

"Oh, said Catherine, with some eagerness, it doesn't take long to like a person?when once you begin."

"One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant."

"On 10 August 1914, five days after war was declared, Henry James, in a letter to a friend, expressed his revulsion at the prospect of war, and articulated the illusion that had preceded it: `Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our beliefs that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible."

"One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable?embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak?"

"One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left."

"Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task."

"Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist?s general disposition to vibrate"

"Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives--I may say it--have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an injured beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, with her obstinate little air penche."

"Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it"

"People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour."