Great Throughts Treasury

"Evil is as direct a manifestation of the divine as good."

"Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and God himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man."

"Everyone had some defect, or body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a sick house and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body, warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or craving for liquor. At that moment he felt a holy compassion for them all. ?The words of the dying God crossed his memory: Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man."

"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother."

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."

"Flaubert prided himself on his frankness; it was indeed brutal."

"Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner."

"For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them."

"For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life."

"For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing."

"For thirty years now I have been studying my fellow-men. I do not know very much about them. I should certainly hesitate to engage a servant on his face, and yet I suppose it is on the face that for the most part we judge the persons we meet. We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong. Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self-contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self-contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. In books on logic they will tell you that it is absurd to say that yellow is tubular or gratitude heavier than air; but in that mixture of incongruities that makes up the self yellow may very well be a horse and cart and gratitude the middle of the week. I shrug my shoulders when people tell me that their first impressions of a person are always right. I think they must have small insight or great vanity. For my own part I find that the longer I know people the more they puzzled me: my oldest friends are just these of whom I can say that I don't know the first thing about them."

"Foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we?re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it."

"For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity."

"For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay..."

"From a social standpoint the man of science does not exist."

"Freedom! That was the thought that sung in her heart so that even though the future was so dim, it was iridescent like the mist over the river where the morning sun fell upon it. Freedom! Not only freedom from a bond that irked, and a companionship which depressed her; freedom, not only from the death which had threatened, but freedom from the love that had degraded her; freedom from all spiritual ties, the freedom of a disembodied spirit, and with freedom, courage , and a valiant unconcern for whatever was to come."

"From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him."

"From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows?"

"Gave me a long look, as though she were trying to read my thoughts."

"Gave her head such a haughty toss that I wondered she didn't get a crick in the neck."

"Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world ? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue our future lives will be less afflicted."

"Have common sense and stick to the point."

"Good gracious, she could have remained faithful to him in spirit while she was being unfaithful to him in the flesh. That is a feat of legerdemain that women find it easy to accomplish.' What a odious cynic you are.' If it's cynical to look truth in the face and exercise common sense in the affairs of life, then certainly I'm a cynic and odious if you like.'"

"Genius is talent provided with ideals."

"Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy"

"Genius is a word that is very loosely used nowadays. It is ascribed to persons to whom a more sober judgement would be satisfied to allow talent. Genius and talent are very different things. Many people have talent; it is not rare: genius is. Talent is adroit and dexterous; it can be cultivated; genius is innate, and too often strangely allied to grave defects. But what is genius?"

"Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous."

"Grief she could not feel, for there had been too much bitterness between her mother and herself to leave in her heart any deep feeling of affection; and looking back on the girl she had been she knew that it was her mother who had made her what she was."

"Happily men don't realize how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveler's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient."

"Had pale scanty hair and an earthy skin."

"He could as little escape her as the cause can escape the effect."

"He considered with some irony the philosophy which he had developed for himself, for it had not been of much use to him in the conjuncture he had passed through; and he wondered whether thought really helped a man in any of the critical affairs of life: it seemed to him rather that he was swayed by some power alien to and yet within himself, which urged him like that great wind of Hell which drove Paolo and Francesca ceaselessly on. He thought of what he was going to do and, when the time came to act, he was powerless in the grasp of instincts, emotions, he knew not what. He acted as though he were a machine driven by the two forces of his environment and personality; his reason was someone looking on, observing the facts but powerless to interfere: it was like those gods of Epicurus, who saw the doings of men from their empyrean heights and had no might to alter one smallest particle of what occurred."

"He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveler in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt."

"He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but no he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight. Without it he would never have had his keen appreciation of beauty, his passion for art and literature, and his interest in the varied spectacle of life...Then he saw that normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect of body or of mind? The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults."

"He died last year. He had endured that life for six years. He was found one morning on the mountainside lying quite peacefully as though he had died in his sleep. From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni which stand out of the sea. It was full moon and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that sight."

"He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveler through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself."

"Hayward honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophical calm... He was an idealist."

"He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."

"He did not know what he sought or what his journeys would bring him; but he had a feeling that he would learn something new about life and gain some clue about the mystery that he had solved only to find more mysterious. And even if he found nothing he would allay the unrest which gnawed his heart."

"He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her."

"He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that."

"He felt a queer little pang of bitterness because reality seemed so different from the ideal"

"He finished his story and looked at Ashenden, letting out a lightning through the slot in her eyes half closed. It's romantic, is not it? he asked. 'And you tell me that this has happened recently? He makes a couple of weeks. It seems impossible Ashenden- replied. It is an argument staged for over sixty years and on which was written more than a hundred novels. You mean life copy us?"

"He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results."

"He had a bitter pain in his heart, for he knew that she was still a stranger to him and his hungry love was destined ever to remain unsatisfied."

"He found himself now in the agreeable situation of being able to do what was best for others and at the same time what was convenient to himself."

"He had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realize that he was the creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshipers."

"He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them."

"He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it."