Great Throughts Treasury

"I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant on an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind."

"I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer."

"I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it's important, the matter is often more important to him than to you."

"I have written this because it may have escaped the notice of many who have admired her [Marie Tempest] brilliant performances that they are due not only to her natural gifts...but to patience, assiduity, industry and discipline. Without these it is impossible to excel in any of the arts."

"I haven't deeply considered the matter? but if to look truth in the face and not resent it when it's unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it's absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep. [The back of beyond]"

"I held my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul."

"I knew that suffering did not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things... it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others."

"I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."

"I learnt that men were moved by a savage egoism, that love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species."

"I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart."

"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."

"I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should, I never thought myself very lovable."

"I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating."

"I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling."

"I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers."

"I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists."

"I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds,' he said himself. 'What I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of chambermaids and the conversation of bishops."

"I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool."

"I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."

"I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination. I don't suppose you know what he is doing here, because I don't think he's very expansive with you. If any man singlehanded can put a stop to this frightful epidemic he's going to do it. He's doctoring the sick, cleaning the city up, trying to get the drinking water pure. He doesn't mind where he goes nor what he does. He's risking his life twenty times a day. He's got Colonel Y in his pocket and he's induced him to put the troops at his disposal. He's even put a little plunk into the magistrate and the old man is really trying to do something. And the nuns at the convent swear by him. They think he's a hero."

"I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests."

"I should have known that I wasn't meant for happiness and a life of ease. I have other work to do in the world."

"'I sometimes think,' said the Eternal, 'that the stars never shine more brightly than when reflected in the muddy waters of a wayside ditch.'"

"I shall beat you,' he said, looking at her. How else should I know you loved me,' she answered."

"I suppose it was the end of the world for her when her husband and her baby were killed. I suppose she didn't care what became of her and flung herself into the horrible degradation of drink and promiscuous copulation to get even with life that had treated her so cruelly. She'd lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn't put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn't drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.' That's the sort of thing you say in novels. It's nonsense and you know it's nonsense. Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn't that that made her evil. Evil doesn't spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defenses it set her free to be herself. Don't waste your pity on her, she's now what at heart she always was."

"I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully."

"I think it may be not unjustly said that Mrs. Barton Trafford fairly ran over with the milk of human kindness, but all the same I have an inkling that if ever the milk of human kindness was charged with vitriol, here was a case in point."

"I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart."

"I suppose money's more important than love."

"I used to listen to the monks repeating the Lord's Prayer; I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel gratitude to him for doing so nor need to, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can't or won't provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities, material and spiritual, of existence he'd have done better not to create them."

"I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I?m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life."

"I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I fell that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safely. That was the last I ever saw of him. 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."

"I thought to myself that men are more interesting than the books, but have the defect that we cannot skip certain chapters.ÿIt has at least flipping through the entire book to find a page worth.ÿAnd we cannot put them on a shelf and get them when we feel like it;ÿyou need to read them when the opportunity presents itself, like a book of a traveling library that is much sought after, and we have to wait our turn to read, and when we receive, we cannot be with him more than twenty four o'clock.ÿWe may not have the desire to read it at that time or it may be that, with the rush in pass unnoticed the only thing he had to offer us. ÿ"

"I tried to picture to myself the mosque before the Christians laid their desecrating hands upon it."

"I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel."

"I was examined yesterday,' he remarked at last. 'It was worth while undergoing the gˆne of it to know that one was perfectly fit.' Philip noticed that he still used a French word in an affected way when an English one would have served."

"I wonder if it's ok being a second-rate painter."

"I wonder if you're not over-sensitive about your misfortune. Has it ever struck you to thank God for it? As long as you accept it rebelliously it can only cause you shame. But if you looked upon it as a cross that was given you to bear only because your shoulders were strong enough to bear it, a sign of God's favor, then it would be a source of happiness to you instead of misery."

"I was growing stale in London. I was tired of doing much the same thing every day. My friends pursued their course with uneventfulness; they had no longer any surprises for me, and when I met them I knew pretty well what they would say; even their love-affairs had a tedious banality. We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly. I was seized with panic. I gave up my small apartment, sold my few belongings, and resolved to start afresh."

"I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

"I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true."

"I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment."

"I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. How much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate."

"I wonder if it matters that 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 they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

"I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts."

"I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you're up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You're intoxicated by the boundless space."

"I would sooner a writer were vulgar than mincing; for life is vulgar, and it is life he seeks."

"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."

"I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written."

"I would prefer a phrase that was easy and unaffected to a phrase that was grammatical."