Great Throughts Treasury

"The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions."

"I believe in the challenging mind, in the unreconciled heart and in the will toward perfection."

"No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it."

"No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquated."

"All change is not growth; all movement is not forward."

"A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure."

"As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"

"Cruelty is the only sin."

"Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?"

"A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away."

"First I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist."

"Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome..."

"He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted -- and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone."

"He knows so little and knows it so fluently."

"He who demands little gets it."

"I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say."

"I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living."

"In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being."

"It is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself."

"Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity."

"I went down and had a friendly reunion with the constellations.... I get a wonderful peace and the most exquisite pleasure from my friendship with the stars."

"I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace."

"It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had."

"It is easy to convince a man who thinks as you do."

"It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me."

"It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment."

"Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity."

"Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion."

"Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead."

"Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it."

"Some women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting."

"The afternoon slipped away while we talked -- she talked brightly when any subject came up that interested her -- and it was the last hour of day -- that grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter for a few precious minutes -- that brought us the thing I had dreaded silently since my first night in the house."

"No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book."

"The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy."

"Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance."

"There are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for."

"There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under their skins."

"There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone."

"To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice."

"Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted."

"Too much principle is often more harmful than too little."

"What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens."

"Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do."

"Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting."

"Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of "all the little emptiness of love.""