Great Throughts Treasury

"Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me."

"Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly."

"What a horror insurgent was bound to him more than one wife, it was the most intimate of an eye; that was lying locked up in his flesh, where he heard howling and struggling to come to light; and that in moments of weakness when he abandoned himself to sleep and the dominated and excluded from life."

"What a number of things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its heart!"

"What a supper I had of it that night, with all my friends around me; and what a meal it was, with Ben Gunn's salted goat and some delicacies and a bottle of old wine from the HISPANIOLA. Never, I am sure, were people gayer or happier. And there was Silver, sitting back almost out of the firelight, but eating heartily, prompt to spring forward when anything was wanted, even joining quietly in our laughter--the same bland, polite, obsequious seaman of the voyage out."

"What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humor, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage, he added more hoarsely. I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!"

"What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, but I can be happy and building at home."

"What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate.""

"What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field."

"When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory."

"When a woman has forgotten once his pride taking the first step, he left a long time looking over your shoulder every consideration childish pride."

"When an old gentlemen waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I was your age," it is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is as good as the other."

"When I am grown to man s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys."

"When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind."

"When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine."

"When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home."

"When we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. . . . O toiling hands of mortals! O wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour."

"Whenever the moon and stars are set, whenever the wind is high, all night long in the dark and wet, a man goes riding by. Late in the night when the fires are out, why does he gallop and gallop about?"

"Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however we'll we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different."

"Whether they want to or not, I was henceforth confined to the better part of my life. How much I enjoyed this thought!"

"While flowing fast away, leaves love behind."

"While here at home, in shining day, we round the sunny garden play, each little Indian sleepy-head is being kissed and put to bed."

"Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain."

"Who's the best shot? asked the captain. Mr. Trelawney, out and away, said I. Mr. Trelawney, will you please pick me off one of these men, sir? [Israel] Hands, if possible."

"Wild horses wouldn't draw it from you?"

"Wine is bottled poetry."

"With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbor's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy."

"With a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion."

"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."

"Woodman, is your courage stout?"

"Ye are a great piper. I'm not fit to blow in the same kingdom with ye. Body of me! ye have mair music in your sporran than I have in my head; And though it still stick in my mind that I could maybe show you another of it with the cold steel, I warn you beforehand-it'll no be fair! It would go against my heart to haggle a man that can blow the pipes as you can!"

"Years may go by, and the wheel in the river wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day, wheel and keep roaring and foaming forever long after all of the boys are away. Home for the Indies and home from the ocean, heroes and soldiers we all will come home; still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion, Turning and churning that river to foam. You with the bean that I gave when we quarreled, I with your marble of Saturday last, honored and old and all gaily appareled, here we shall meet and remember the past."

"Yet I had not been many days shut up with them before I began to be ashamed of my first judgment, when I had drawn away from them at the Ferry pier, as though they had been unclean beasts. No class of man is altogether bad, but each has its own faults and virtues; and these shipmates of mine were no exception to the rule. Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues. They were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty."

"Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum."

"You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage."

"You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving."

"You can kill the body but not the spirit."

"You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else."

"You cannot run away from a weakness, you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now and where you stand?"

"You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else."

"You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late."

"You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy."

"You have to let me go my own way in the darkness."

"You may imagine how I felt when I heard this abominable old rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used to me. I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him through the barrel."

"You may lay to that."

"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."

"You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."

"You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us."

"Your head ain't much account, nor ever was. But you're"

"You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!"