Great Throughts Treasury

"Poor Henry [James], he's spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they're having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying."

"Poor Henry, he's spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they're having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying"

"Poor slut, I think she loves me,' said Gray, his eyes closed."

"Reflecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers"

"Religion is... a conspiracy of... priests to gain control over the people."

"PORTEOUS: Do you mean to say you were going to steal my car. TEDDIE: Not exactly. I was only going to bolshevize it, so to speak."

"Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding."

"Saw everything larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of sentimentality."

"Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it."

"Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames."

"Self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son."

"Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way."

"Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs."

"Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion."

"She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?"

"She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her."

"She did not know why it seemed to her so tragic to cry in her sleep."

"She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she out into her answer."

"She had in point of fact by now made up her mind to accept it, but she well knew that men like to think they decide matters for themselves."

"She had a wild impulse to seize the stout, good-natured nun by the shoulders and shake her, crying: Don't you know that I'm a human being, unhappy and alone, and I want comfort and sympathy and encouragement; oh, can't you turn a minute away from God and give me a little compassion; not the Christian compassion that you have for all suffering things, but just human compassion for me?"

"She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses."

"She had a very agreeable smile; it did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed rather to suffuse it by degrees with charm. It hesitated for a moment about her lips and then slowly traveled to those great shining eyes of hers and there softly lingered."

"She loved three things ? a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man."

"She must really love you to distraction. It's rather a funny sensation, you know, he answered, wrinkling a perplexed forehead. I haven't the smallest doubt that if I really left her, definitely, she would commit suicide. Not with any ill-feeling towards me, but quite naturally, because she was unwilling to live without me. It is a curious feeling it gives one to know that. It can't help meaning something to you."

"She managed (as so few people do) to look exactly what she was."

"She played Bach. I do not know the names of the pieces, but I recognized the stiff ceremonial of the French-ified little German courts and the sober, thrifty comfort of the burghers, and the dancing on the village green, the green trees that looked like Christmas trees, and the sunlight on the wide German country, and a tender coziness; and in my nostrils there was a warm scent of the soil and I was conscious of a sturdy strength that seemed to have its roots deep in mother earth, and of an elemental power that was timeless and had no home in space."

"She saw shrewdly that the world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willingly avoids the sight of distress."

"She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate."

"She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious."

"She was one of those hostesses who look upon it as a mark of hospitality to make their guests eat however unwilling they may be."

"She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference."

"She took my hand and told me not to grieve; for wherever we were, she said, there was France and there was God."

"She was one of those writers, far from rare in the world of letters, who suppose that push and pull are an adequate substitute for talent."

"So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall."

"She would not risk to grow so fond of her home that it was a pain to leave it; she preferred to remain a wayfarer, sauntering through life with a heart keen to detect beauty, and a mind, open and unbiased, ready to laugh at the absurd."

"She?s wonderful. Tell her I?ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you. Waddington, smiling, translated the question. She says I?m good. As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue, Kitty mocked."

"So now what?'"

"Society tempts me to its service by honors and riches and the good opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good opinion, I despise honors and I can do very well without riches."

"Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-seeker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand bookseller's list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without ? who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? ? and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot. And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow-travelers have come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable."

"Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither."

"Some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not."

"Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes. Waddington reflected for a little while. I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

"Sometimes one feels rage and despair that one should know so little the people one loves. one is heartbroken at the impossibility of understanding them, of getting right down into their hearts . sometimes, accidentally or under the influence of some emotion, one gets a glimpse of some emotion , one gets a glimpse of those inner selves , and one despairs how ignorant one is of that inner self and how far away one is from it."

"Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs."

"Sometimes I think that when we say our honor prevents us from doing this or that we deceive ourselves, and our real motive is vanity."

"Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem."

"Thank god I'm free from all that now, he thought. And yet even as he said it he was not quit sure whether he spoke sincerely. When he was under the influence of passion he had felt a singualr vigour, and his mind has worked with unwonted force. He was more alive, there was an excitement of sheer being, an eager vehemence of soul, which made life now a little dull."

"Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither."

"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."

"That his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will ... against a deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him."