Great Throughts Treasury

"So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some."

"Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions."

"Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred."

"Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough."

"Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady."

"Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!"

"No doubt it is true that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare, sudden gentlenesses of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the continual gentleness of gentle people. Arrogance turned gentle melts the heart."

"Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth. Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth either."

"There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times."

"Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them."

"In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom."

"Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously."

"Sensitive and even resentful, I tried to make my novel answer all this nonsense. A thing the novel tried to say was that in the matter of human character the people of such an out-of-the-way midland village were as estimable as any others anywhere. . . . This, in my sensitive young fervor, was my emotional tribute to the land of my birth."

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls."

"One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations of every natural act."