Great Throughts Treasury

"I think there is a devil in women: all these years passed, never a sight of the man, little enough kindness to remember (by all accounts) even while she had him, his heartless rapacity laid bare to her; that all should not do, and she must still keep the best place in her heart for this accursed fellow, is a thing to make a plain man rage."

"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel s sake. The great affair is to move."

"I try to avoid asking questions that too strongly reminiscent of doomsday. The question is like a stone causing an avalanche. You sit quietly on the top of the hill, and the stone falls down, moving the other, and finally some inconspicuous, which even for a moment thought enters your head in the backyard, and the whole family has so far respected quickly change the name. Oh no, my dear, I created my own right? seem to matter, the less I ask for it."

"I want none of your money, said I, but what you owe my father. I'll get you one glass, and no more. When I brought it to him, he seized it greedily and drank it out. Aye, aye, said he, that's some better, sure enough. And now, matey, did that doctor say how long I was to lie here in this old berth?"

"I was the giant great and still that sits upon the pillow-hill, and sees before him, dale and plain, the pleasant land of counterpane."

"I went up to the truth, whose discovery was to take part in such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but two-fold."

"I who all the Winter through, cherished other loves than you and kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew; now I know the false and true, for the earnest sun looks through, and my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew."

"I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house."

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me of green days in forests and blue days at sea."

"I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."

"I, whom Apollo sometime visited, or feigned to visit, now, my day being done, do slumber wholly, nor shall know at all the weariness of changes; nor perceive immeasurable sands of centuries drink up the blanching ink, or the loud sound of generations beat the music down."

"Ice and iron cannot be welded."

"Idleness does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class."

"If all my verse, like not a single line; but like my title, for it is not mine. That title from a better man I stole: ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!"

"If he be Mr.Hyde,' he had thought, 'I shall be Mr. Seek."

"If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also."

"If it comes to a swinging, swing all, say I."

"If thy morals make thee dreary, depend upon it they are wrong."

"If we take matrimony at its lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognized by the police."

"If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

"If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife."

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people."

"I'll be as silent as the grave."

"I'm cap'n here by 'lection. I'm cap'n here because I'm the best man by a long sea-mile. You won't fight, as gentlemen o' fortune should; then, by thunder, you'll obey, and you may lay to it! I like that boy, now; I never seen a better boy than that. He's more a man than any pair of rats of you in this here house, and what I say is this: let me see him that'll lay a hand on him--that's what I say, and you may lay to it."

"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand colored pictures to the eye."

"In each of us, two natures are at war ? the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose ? what we want most to be we are."

"In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy. To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."

"In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others."

"In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for a practical existence."

"In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being."

"In most men, the reasons of good and evil that divide and set up the dual nature of man."

"In the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard."

"In the highlands, in the country places, where the old plain men have rosy faces, and the young fair maidens quiet eyes."

"In the immediate nearness of the gold, all else had been forgotten? and I could not doubt that he hoped to seize upon the treasure, find and board the Hispanola under cover of night, cut every honest throat about that island, and sail away as he had at first intended, laden with crimes and riches."

"In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations."

"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."

"Into no other city does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane:?and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic."

"Is not it a terrible thing that's salvation means eternal damnation to someone else?"

"Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?"

"Is there anything in life that disappoint as much as what you want to achieve?"

"It causes great dislike asking questions: have a lot of doom doomsday. It launches a question as if a stone is pushed. One sits quietly atop his mount, and there goes the stone, dragging others in his movement, and perhaps, a poor man, the least one could imagine, gets hit in the head, in your own garden and his family have to change their surnames. No, sir; for me is already a rule: the more strange it seems a matter, fewer questions."

"It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year; the boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier. The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro, a flash of sun is on the veering of the vane. Autumn leaves and rain, the passion of the gale."

"It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves."

"It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy"

"It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say."

"It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is... to live forever."

"It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives."

"It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste is like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, then to die daily in the sick-room."

"It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive."

"It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happily apart from thought or work; . . . Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness."