Great Throughts Treasury

"Well, I am rather afraid of that visit, said Clifford. It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again. The Baroness looked at him a moment. My dear child, she said, there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman--probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions gratis. With me you would get it gratis."

"What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude - that was what he had figured as the beast in the jungle."

"What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise--although the philosophers generally call it "recognition"!"

"What is character but the determination of incident?"

"Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it--to make any sort of success in it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can't always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you're very ready to do; but there's another thing that's still more important--you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that--you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all--you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views--that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself."

"What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something?and this reached him with a pang?that he, John Marcher, hadn?t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher?s arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?... The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived."

"What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?"

"When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them."

"Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial ? he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable."

"What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one's self?"

"When I am wicked I am in high spirits."

"When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then flows back again. (...) One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive."

"When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defense. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will best consult its interests by not mingling in the game."

"Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will always carry your goodness."

"Wherever we go we carry this burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we step we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven."

"Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?"

"Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots."

"Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater."

"With this reminder other things came to her -- how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn't mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price."

"With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him?it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped."

"Writing is not primarily escape, but use."

"Yes, that's the bore of comfort, said Lord Warburton. We only know when we're uncomfortable."

"You are good for nothing unless you are clever."

"You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly someone tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground."

"You must come to Lockleigh again, said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel's friend. Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton?the peace, the kindness, the honor, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: I'm afraid I can never come again."

"You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together."

"You must save what you can of your life; you mustn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part."

"You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can?t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown."

"You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you've nothing left."

"You wanted to look at life for yourself ? but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!"

"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."

"You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it."