Great Throughts Treasury

"You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build."

"A man should always be drunk, Minnie, when he talks politics ? it's the only way in which to make them important."

"A sober black shawl hides her body entirely touched by the sun and the salt spray of the sea but down in the darkness a slim hand so lovely carries a rich bunch of red roses for me. Her petticoat simple and her feet are but bare and all that she has is but neat and scanty but stars in the deep of her eyes are exclaiming I carry a rich bunch of red roses for thee. No arrogant gem sits enthroned on her forehead or swings from a white ear for all men to see but jeweled desire in a bosom so pearly carries a rich bunch of red roses for me."

"Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity."

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."

"As far as I can see, the Polis as Polis, in this city, is Null an' Void!"

"Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work."

"Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be."

"Disease can never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine."

"Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle."

"I often looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question ? what is the stars, what is the stars?"

"I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other."

"I am going where life is more like life than it is here."

"If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose."

"If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea."

"Isn't all religions curious? If they weren't you wouldn't get anyone to believe them."

"It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it."

"It's I who know that well: when it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me."

"Is America a land of God where saints abide forever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich‚?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God."

"Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction into another's woe. Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another."

"Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other; two gay guardian angels every human ought to have."

"Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living."

"Kind man, brave man, wise soul, indomitable spirit of the indomitable Irishry."

"Laughter is wine for the soul ? laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm, all along, out along, down along lea. A laugh is a great natural stimulator, a pushful entry into life; and once we can laugh, we can live. It is the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living."

"She dresses herself to keep him with her, but it's no use ? after a month or two, th'wonder of a woman wears off."

"Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves"

"Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its ten thousands."

"No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year."

"The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly."

"The hallway of every man's life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live."

"The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction."

"The secret to happiness is to find a congenial monotony."

"The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood."

"The whole world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."

"There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."

"The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-colored bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York."

"The whole worl's in a state o' chassis."

"The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed"

"There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible."

"Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."

"What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in. The one lovely world he knew, lived in, that gave him all he had, was, according to preacher and prelate, the one to be least in his thoughts. He was recommended, ordered, from the day of his birth to bid goodbye to it. Oh, we have had enough of the abuse of this fair earth! It is no sad truth that this should be our home. Were it but to give us simple shelter, simple clothing, simple food, adding the lily and the rose, the apple and the pear, it would be a fit home for mortal or immortal man."

"When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me."

"Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow -- security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself."