Great Throughts Treasury

"There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

"There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself."

"There is a certain elegance in wasting time. Any fool can waste money, but when you waste time you waste what is priceless."

"There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation."

"There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?"

"There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless."

"There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge."

"There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields."

"There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are ignorant. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed."

"There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent."

"There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species."

"There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain."

"There was neither good nor bad there. There were just facts. It was life."

"There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed."

"There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved."

"There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months."

"They ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to him and I don't know what else; it seems to me so strange that they never credit him with common-sense or allow him tolerance. If he knew as much about human nature as I do he'd know how weak men are and how little control they have over their passions, he'd know how full of fear they are and how pitiful, he'd know how much goodness there is even in the worst and how much wickedness in the best. If he's capable of feeling he must be capable of remorse, and when he considers what a hash he's made in the creation of human kind can he feel anything but that? The wonder is that he does not make use of his omnipotence to annihilate himself. Perhaps that's just what he has done."

"There's a certain elegance to waste time Ashenden- replied. Any idiot can waste money, but when you spend your own time is pleased to pull something that is priceless."

"There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved."

"They don't want clever men; clever men have ideas, and ideas cause trouble; they want men who have charm and tact and who can be counted on never to make a blunder."

"They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him."

"They threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after the ineffable."

"There's nothing the world loves more than a readymade description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future."

"They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jeweled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words."

"They?re like little boys, men. Sometimes of course they?re rather naughty and you have to pretend to be angry with them. They attach so much importance to such entirely unimportant things that it?s really touching. And they?re so helpless. Have you never nursed a man when he?s ill? It wrings your heart. It?s just like a dog or a horse. They haven?t got the sense to come in out of the rain, poor darlings. They have all the charming qualities that accompany general incompetence. They?re sweet and good and silly, and tiresome and selfish. You can?t help liking them, they?re so ingenuous, and so simple. They have no complexity or finesse. I think they?re sweet, but it?s absurd to take them seriously."

"They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father's affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the bread-winner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her."

"Things don't get any easier by putting them off."

"They're a funny lot, suicides. I remember one man who couldn't get any work to do and his wife died, so he pawned his clothes and bought a revolver; but he made a mess of it, he only shot out an eye and he got alright. And then, if you please, with an eye gone and a piece of his face blown away, he came to the conclusion that the world wasn't such a bad place after all, and he lived happily ever afterwards. Thing I've always noticed, people don't commit suicide for love, as you'd expect, that's just a fancy of novelists; they commit suicide because they haven't got any money. I wonder why that is."

"Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it could ever have escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet?s history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come notas the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment."

"This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom. Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet."

"Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her her thrill. They braced her like a tonic. Life acquired significance. She was about to step from the world of make-believe into the world of reality."

"Though he had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table."

"Though I said that affection was the greatest enemy of love, I would never deny that it's a very good substitute. I'm not sure that a marriage founded on it isn't the happiest."

"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."

"Those who cannot in any other thing usually starts writing."

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."

"Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. Cleopatra dissolved in wine a priceless pearl, but she gave it to Anthony to drink; when you waste the brief golden hours you take the beaker in which the gem is melted and dash its contents to the ground."

"To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give."

"To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day."

"To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden. And the worst of it is that it will all be the same in a hundred years, said Dick. We shall both be forgotten long before then, you with your strenuousness, and I with my folly. And what conclusion do you draw from that? asked Mrs. Crowley. Only that the psychological moment has arrived for a whisky and soda."

"To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one's admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer."

"To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born."

"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."

"To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul."

"To put myself in it, my dear fellow. It was of very good design, and I thought it would balance the font on the other side of the entrance, but those early Christians were stumpy little fellows and I shouldn't have fitted in. I wasn't going to lie there till the Last Trump with my knees doubled up to my chin like a fetus. Most uncomfortable."

"To write simply is as difficult as to be good."

"Tolerance is another word for indifference."