Great Throughts Treasury

"Success is little more than a chemical compound of man with moment."

"History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other."

"There is something odd about the weakness which irreligious men feel for religion. Almost invariably it becomes their favorite topic."

"Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people. "

"Greatness is so often a courteous synonym for great success."

"Any stigma will do to beat a dogma."

"Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be."

"People who jump to conclusions rarely alight on them."

"I had always imagined that Clich‚ was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford."

"The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds."

"Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium."

"The Lord Chief Justice of England recently said that the greater part of his judicial time was spent investigating collisions between propelled vehicles, each on its own side of the road, each sounding its horn and each stationary."

"The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender."