Great Throughts Treasury

"A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right."

"A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations."

"A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind."

"A moment before I had been safe of all men's respect, wealthy, beloved - the cloth laying for me in the dining room at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows."

"A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task."

"A woman who loves, likes to be obeyed at the beginning, although you can find then his joy in obeying. Do as I ask you, for God's sake, or not answer at all."

"able to hear, I reckon; leastways, your ears is big enough."

"About as emotional as a bagpipe."

"Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate."

"After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbors; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect."

"Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?"

"Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age."

"Ah, said Silver, it were fortunate for me that I had Hawkins here. You would have let old john be cut to bits, and never given it a thought, doctor. 'Not a thought,' replied Dr. Livesey cheerily."

"Ah, there, said Morgan, that comed of sp'iling Bibles. That comes--as you call it--of being arrant asses, retorted the doctor."

"Alan, cried I, what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow? Deed, and I don't, know said Alan. For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled:?and now I like ye better!"

"Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?"

"Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colors on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy--'"

"All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God?s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel."

"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."

"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."

"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?"

"Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea."

"Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious."

"Although undoubtedly two-faced, I was not a hypocrite. Both my half progressed in earnest. I was together when having broken the dam, nurza?em in the dirt. But I was also one another when in the bright light of day I worked on the progress of science or was carrying relief to the suffering and misery."

"Am I no a bonny fighter?"

"An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."

"An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils."

"And he took another swallow of the brandy, shaking his great fair head like a man who looks forward to the worst."

"And I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we are. To detect the flavor of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colors of the sunset."

"And I have come so far; and the sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there, far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on those ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny."

"And like the mandrake comes with groans."

"And my heart springs anew, bright and confident and true, and the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew."

"And 'Oh man!' quo he, 'am I no a bonny fighter?"

"And the true realizm, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all."

"And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something. The score! he burst out. Three goes o' rum! Why, shiver my timbers, if I hadn't forgotten my score! And, falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining; and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again."

"And yet Alan had behaved like a child, and (what is worse) a treacherous child."

"And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass I was conscious of no repugnance,rather a leap of welcome. This too, was myself."

"Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means."

"As a monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map or through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the real knot of our identity - that central metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware - or the diligent service of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the whole?"

"As I looked there came, I thought a change - he seemed to swell - his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter."

"As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened."

"At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath, "Silence, there, between decks!""

"Away with funeral music ? set the pipe to powerful lips - the cup of life's for him that drinks and not for him that sips."

"Ay, we have the same blood, moralized Gotthold. You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic."

"Bad particle nature, now liberated and undertaking the power was physically weaker and less developed than the good which spurned. At the same time, however, the soul of the less and exhausted, as far devoting nine-tenths of life after work, virtue and conscious, subjected to the rigors of duty performance. That's why Edward Hyde was much lower, slimmer and younger than Henry Jekyll. One face has cleared the inner glow of light, on the other the darkness of evil carved out a deep imprint. Furthermore, bad (after all weaker man than good) and distorted as if the whole figure okaleczy?o your lives."

"Baldric; but he made a remark that seems worthy of record."

"Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, hills of home!"

"Bed in Summer - In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see the birds still hopping on the tree, or hear the grown-up people's feet still going past me in the street. And does it not seem hard to you, when all the sky is clear and blue, and I should like so much to play, to have to go to bed by day?"

"Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder. laugh! Before an hour's out, ye'll laugh upon the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones."

"Before us, over the tree tops, we beheld a great field of open sea to the East. Sheer above us rose single pines, black with precipices. There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all around, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude."