Great Throughts Treasury

"Man will ultimately be known as a conglomerate of various entities, inconsistent and independent of each other."

"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail."

"Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted mostly."

"Marriage is a friendship recognized by the police."

"Marriage is like life in this--that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses."

"Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so."

"Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years."

"My body which my dungeon is, and yet my parks and palaces: ?Which is so great that there I go all the day long to and fro."

"My dear, said my mother suddenly, take the money and run on. I am going to faint. This was certainly the end for us both, I thought. How I cursed the cowardice of the neigbors; how I blamed my poor mother for her honesty and her greed, for her past foolhardiness and present weakness! We were just at the little bridge, by good fortune, and I helped her, tottering as she was, to the edge of the bank, where, sure enough, she gave a sigh and fell on my shoulder. I do not know how I found the strength to do it all, and I am afraid it was roughly done, but I managed to drag her down to the bank and a little way under the arch. Farther I could not mover her, for the bridge was too low to let me do more than crawl below it. So there we had to stay--my mother almost entirely visible and both of us within earshot of the inn."

"My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring."

"My friend, I said something derisive tone, you are very clever! But would not it be easier to write a few words? That's an excellent point, sir, 'said Alan Balfour of Shaws also chanza-; would certainly be much easier for me to write, but for John Breck would be very painful to have to read it. I'd have to go to school for two or three years, and may we cans semos of waiting."

"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. 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 afield."

"No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable."

"No man lives in the external truth, among salt and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls."

"Noble disappointment, noble self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay without."

"Not Diana herself, although this was more of a Venus after all, could have done a graceful thing more gracefully."

"Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is ? nor yet so good a Christian."

"Nothing like a little judicious levity."

"Nothing made by brute force lasts."

"Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own."

"Now the hedged meads renew rustic odor, smiling hue, and the clean air shines and twinkles as the world goes wheeling through; and my heart springs up anew, bright and confident and true. And my old love come to meet me in the dawning and the dew."

"Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard."

"Now when the number of my years is all fulfilled and I from sedentary life shall rouse me up to die, bury me low and let me lie under the wide and starry sky. Joying to live, I joyed to die, bury me low and let me die."

"Now, Bill, sit where you are, said the beggar. If I can't see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your right hand. Boy, take his right hand by the wrist and bring it near my right. We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captain's, which closed upon it instantly."

"O God!' I screamed, and 'O God!' again and again; for there before my eyes--pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death--there stood Henry Jekyll!"

"O it's I that am the captain of a tidy little ship, of a ship that goes a sailing on the pond; and my ship it keeps a-turning all around and all about; but when I'm a little older, I shall find the secret out How to send my vessel sailing on beyond. For I mean to grow a little as the dolly at the helm, and the dolly I intend to come alive; And with him beside to help me, it's a-sailing I shall go, It's a-sailing on the water, when the jolly breezes blow And the vessel goes a dive-dive-dive. O it's then you'll see me sailing through the rushes and the reeds, And you'll hear the water singing at the prow; For beside the dolly sailor, I'm to voyage and explore, To land upon the island where no dolly was before, And to fire the penny cannon in the bow."

"O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."

"Of 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!"

"Of Silver we have heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I dare say he met his old Negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small."

"Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?"

"Old and young we are all on our last cruise."

"Old is the tree and the fruit good."

"On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour."

"Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good."

"One generation after another falls like honeybees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is theirs dissolubly, and they will never return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it forever in their books and pictures."

"One more step, Mr. Hands, said I, and I'll blow your brains out! Dead men don't bite, you know, I added with a chuckle."

"One morning, very early, when the sun was up, I rose and found the shiny dew on every buttercup."

"One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy--if I may."

"Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits."

"Palm Key he got itt, and some other snatches, mostly single words and unintelligible. I could not help wondering who it was that had got itt, and what itt was"

"Partly from the damping influence of this alarm, partly to rest Silver and the sick folk, the whole party sat down as soon as they had gained the brow of the ascent."

"Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age."

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."

"Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!"

"Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary."

"Raymond Chandler wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered."

"Saints are sinners who kept on going."

"Sanctions and tales dislimn like mist"

"Scared by the thought , brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some jack-in-the-box of an old iniquity, should leap to light there."

"Sceptic??coward! cried Otto. Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!"