Great Throughts Treasury

"I?m not afraid of my fear. It?s folly, the Christian argument that you should live always in view of your death. The only way to live is to forget that you?re going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man. 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."

"If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers."

"I'd sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours."

"If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish."

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."

"I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp."

"If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive his grace. It seem to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn't prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn't common sense. I didn't see why you shouldn't believe in a God who hadn't created the world, buyt had to make the best of the bad job he'd found, a being enormously better, wiser and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn't made and who might be hoped in the end to overcome it. But on the other hand I didn't see why you should."

"If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie."

"If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself."

"If the future was so vague it meant perhaps that she was destined never to see it."

"If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once too great and too small for love."

"If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech."

"If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it."

"If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be so grossly over-populated as it is now."

"If there's anything I dislike it's the violin, she answered. Why one should want to hear anyone scrape the hairs of a horse's tail against the guts of a dead cat is something I shall never understand."

"If the rose at noon has lost the beauty at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it."

"If you can create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."

"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."

"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?"

"If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts."

"If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."

"I'm afraid you've thought me a bigger fool than I am."

"If you'd ever had a grown-up daughter you'd know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her - well, it's much better to pretend you're the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for."

"I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell, their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ."

"I'm sure I'm very grateful to you, Philip. I'm very much flattered at your proposal.' 'Oh, don't talk rot. You will marry me, won't you?' 'D'you think we should be happy?' 'No. But what does that matter?"

"I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it."

"I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?"

"I'm looking for something and I don't quite know what it is. But I know that it's very important for me to know it, and if I did it would make all the difference. Perhaps the nuns know it; when I'm with them I feel that they hold a secret which they will not share with me. I don't know why it came into my head that if I saw this Manchu woman I should have an inkling of what I am looking for. Perhaps she would tell me if she could. What makes you think she knows it? Kitty gave him a sidelong glance, but did not answer. Instead she asked him a question. Do you know it? He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whisky and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither."

"In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from Vladivostok, .One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs. A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty. Their uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big vigorous fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn't eighteen. He had a broad face, with flat, wide features, and on his forehead was a great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train waited and he sang song after song. I could not understand his words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of the wild corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long months of dark winter; and then the dancing of the women in the villages and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death. It was horrible and deeply moving. A cap lay at the singer's feet and the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting world. He did not seem quite human. The soldiers stood silent and hostile. Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the traveling herd. There was a disdainful anger on their side and unmeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain."

"Impropriety is the soul of wit."

"Imagination's an odd thing, it dries up."

"In a great library, you get into society in the widest sense? From that great crowd you can choose what companions you please, for in these silent gatherings? the highest is at the service of the lowest with a grand humility. In a library you become a true citizen of the world."

"In art honesty is not only the best but the only policy."

"In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy."

"In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces."

"In life what cannot be tolerated, breaks that cause others to kill and not in appearance."

"In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally."

"In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do."

"In love one should exercise economy of intercourse. None of us can love for ever. Love will be stronger and will last longer if there are impediments of its gratification. If a lover is prevented from enjoying his love by absence, difficulty of access, or by the caprice or coldness of his beloved, he can find a little consolation in the thought that when his wishes are fulfilled his delight will be intense. But love being what it is, should there be no hindrances, he will pay no attention to the considerations of prudence; and his punishment will be satiety. The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned."

"In the first place it's not true that people improve as you know them better: they don't. That's why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An acquaintance shows you only the best of himself, he's considerate and polite, he conceals his defects behind a mask of social convention; but we grow so intimate with him that he throws the mask aside, get to know him so well that he doesn't trouble any longer to pretend; then you'll discover a being of such meanness, of such trivial nature, of such weakness, of such corruption, that you'd be aghast if you didn't realize that that was his nature and it was just as stupid to condemn him as to condemn the wolf because he ravens or the cobra because he strikes."

"In schools the rather stupid boys who work always do better than the clever boy who's idle, but when the clever boy works ? why then, he does what you've done this term."

"In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four."

"In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time."

"In the midst of life we are in death --one can never tell what may happen."

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of everyday a source of bitter disappointment."

"In the week I promised myself I should naturally read, for to the habitual reader reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory."

"Is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball? Poker's the only game fit for a grown man. Then, your hand is against every man's, and every man's is against yours. Teamwork? Who ever made a fortune by teamwork? There's only one way to make a fortune, and that's to down the fellow who's up against you."

"Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armor and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter..."

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. (Philip always pretended that he was not lame.) She restored his belief in himself and put healing ointments, as it were, on all the bruises of his soul. ?Why d?you read then?? ?Partly for pleasure, because it?s a habit and I?m just as uncomfortable if I don?t read as if I don?t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for ME, and it becomes part of me; I?ve got out of the book all that?s any use to me, and I can?t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one?s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there.? ?It would have interfered with my work,? he told Philip. ?What work?? asked Philip brutally. ?My inner life,? he answered. Buffeted by the philistines. the love of poetry was dead in England.(its dead everywhere write poem on that idea)."

"Is it rash to assume that when a practiced writer says a thing, he is more likely to mean what he says than what his commentators think he means?"