Great Throughts Treasury

"There's just ae thing I cannae bear, an' that's my conscience."

"There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward"

"They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;"

"This be the verse you grave for me: ?Here he lies, where he longed to be; home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.?"

"This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still."

"This is a handy cove, says he at length; and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate? My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity."

"This is still the strangest thing in all man's traveling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories."

"This Mr. Thomson seems a gentleman of some choice qualities, though perhaps a trifle bloody-minded. It would please me none the worse, if (with all his merits) he were soused in the North Sea; for the man, Mr. Balfour, is a sore embarrassment."

"This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life."

"This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."

"Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?' Most likely Trelawney's own men, said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.' Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.' I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain."

"Time which none can bind."

"Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support."

"To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall."

"To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man."

"To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity."

"To be over wise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stock still."

"To be what we are capable of becoming, and to achieve what we are capable of achieving, is the only end of life."

"To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life."

"To believe in immortality is one thing, but first believe in life."

"To cast in it with Hyde was to die a thousand interests and aspirations."

"To forget oneself is to be happy."

"To know that you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."

"To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed."

"To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden"

"To make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto."

"To me there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

"To My Mother - You too, my mother, read my rhymes for love of unforgotten times, and you may chance to hear once more the little feet along the floor."

"To the Hesitating Purchaser: If sailor tales to sailor tunes, storm and adventure, heat and cold, if schooners, islands, and maroons and Buccaneers and buried Gold and all the old romance, retold, exactly in the ancient way, can please, as me they pleased of old, the wiser youngsters of to-day: -So be it, and fall on! If not, if studious youth no longer crave, his ancient appetites forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, or Cooper of the wood and wave: So be it, also! And may I and all my pirates share the grave, where these and their creations lie!"

"Trelawney, said the doctor, contrary to all my notions, I believe you have managed to get two honest men on board with you--that man and John Silver. Silver, if you like, cried the squire, but as for that intolcrable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English."

"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate."

"Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity."

"Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who carries them. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas, that they go about the streets 'with a lie in their right hand?' Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature, umbrellarians, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have failed, have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives."

"Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self."

"Under the wide and starry sky dig the grave and let me lie: glad did I live and gladly die, and I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: here he lies where he long'd to be; home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill."

"Upon one pin-point of the truth."

"Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man."

"Very old and thick the wood."

"Want me when I least deserve it, because it will be when you need it"

"We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it."

"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best that we find is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many."

"We consume the carcasses of creatures that have the appetite and passions as our bodies and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."

"We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others."

"We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable--not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit."

"We had each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which discolored all experience to its own shade."

"We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were made that we might communicate speedier at great distances."

"We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series."

"We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature."

"We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilised life, where people pass without salutation."

"We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented."