Great Throughts Treasury

"I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more."

"I have come to the conclusion that the bed comprehends our whole life; for we were bom in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it."

"I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

"I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me."

"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt."

"I hope you realize that you really hit it off with the ladies? You must cultivate that. It could take you far."

"I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space."

"I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy."

"I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called madness."

"I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?"

"I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me ? afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?"

"I told myself everything is a being! The shout that is year passes into the air like an animal entity, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?"

"I saw a man so burning at the stake, and that inspired me the desire to disappear in the same way. In this way it disappears immediately. Man rushes slow work of nature ... The body is dead, the spirit disappeared."

"I took the book from him reverently, and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth."

"I tried to reason with me, I felt the very strong desire not to be afraid, but there was something in me that my will, and that something else was afraid. I wondered what I could fear, my my my brave coward taunted me, and never as good as the day I entered the opposition of two people who we are, one wanting the other resistant and everyone taking turns."

"I was going to open his mouth and addressed the girl, when someone touched my shoulder. I turned, startled, and saw an ordinary-looking man, young or old, who looked at me sadly. - I want to talk, he said. I made ??a face he saw no doubt, for he added: - It is important. I got up and followed him to the other end of the boat: - 'Sir,' he said, when winter approaches with the cold, rain and snow, your doctor tells you every day: Keep up the horny feet, keep you chills, colds, bronchitis, pleurisy. So you take every precaution, you wear flannel, thick coat, big shoes, which does not prevent you always spend two months in bed. But when spring comes with its leaves and flowers, warm breezes and enervating, his exhalations fields who bring you vague unrest, tenderness without cause, there is no one who comes to say, Sir, beware Love! It is lurking everywhere you lurks on every corner, all his tricks are strained, all sharp weapons, all its sham prepared! Beware of love! ... Beware of love! It is more dangerous than the common cold, bronchitis and pleurisy! He does not forgive, and is committed to everyone nonsense irreparable. Yes, sir, I say that every year, the government should put on the walls of large posters with the words: Back in the spring. French citizens, beware of love, the same is written on the door of the house: Beware of the paint! - Well, since the government does not do it, I replaced, and I tell you: Beware of love, he is telling you pinch, and it is my duty to warn you as warns, Russia, one from whose nose freezes. I stood amazed at this particular strange, and taking a dignified: Well, sir, you seem to meddle in what does not concern you much. He made ??a sudden movement, and said: - Oh! sir! sir! if I see a man will drown in a dangerous place, so it must be left to perish?"

"I was hard hit. I wanted to ask this little girl to marry me. If we had passed eight days together, I should have done so! How weak and incomprehensible a man sometimes is!"

"If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again."

"It is the encounters with people that make life worth living."

"If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?"

"In fact living is dying."

"It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both."

"It is love that is sacred, she said. Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is."

"In the cold light of the morning they almost bore a grudge against the girl for not having secretly sought out the Prussian, that the rest of the party might receive a joyful surprise when they awoke. What more simple?"

"It was then between one o'clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit before me, and the lunar crescent peeped out from behind the clouds - that sad crescent of the last quarter of the moon. The crescent of the new moon, that which rises at four or five o'clock in the evening, is clear, bright and silvery; but that which rises after midnight is red, sinister and disquieting; it is the true crescent of the witches' Sabbath: all night-walkers must have remarked the contrast. The first, even when it is as narrow as a silver thread, projects a cheery ray, which rejoices the heart, and casts on the ground sharply defined shadows; while the latter reflects only a mournful glow, so wan that the shadows are bleared and indistinct. (Who Knows?)"

"Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother."

"Let them respect my convictions, and I will respect theirs!"

"Let us protest and let us be angry, let us be indignant, or let us be enthusiastic, Schopenhauer has marked humanity with the seal of his disdain and of his disenchantment."

"Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down."

"Life seemed to have stopped short; the shops were shut, the streets deserted. Now and then an inhabitant, awed by the silence, glided swiftly by in the shadow of the walls. The anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of the enemy."

"Love always has its price, come whence it may."

"It was now autumn, and I made ??up my mind to make, Before winter set in, year excursion across Normandy, a country with Which I was not acquainted. It must be born in mind that I Began with Rouen, and for a week I wandered about with enthusiastic admiration, in That picturesque town of the Middle Ages, in That veritable museum of extraordinary Gothic monuments. Well, one afternoon, somewhere about four a 'clock, as I Happened to be passing down year out-of-the-way by-street, in the middle of a deep river flowed Which, black as ink, named the Eau de Robec, my attention directed to Wholly Examining the bizarre and antique Physiognomy of the houses, all of a sudden was attracted by the sight of a series of shops of furniture brokers, one after the other, from door to door along the street. Ah! These brokers had used locality Their Chosen well, sordid These traffickers of old bric-a-brac, in this fantastic alley leading up from That sinister dark stream of water, under the steep overhanging pointed gables of shingle tiled roofs and projecting eaves, Where The weathercocks of the past still creaked overhead. (Who Knows?)"

"It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living."

"It's not difficult to appear bright, don't worry. The main thing is never to show obvious ignorance of anything. You prevaricate, avoid the difficulty, steer clear of the problem and then catch other people out by using a dictionary. All men are stupid oafs and ignorant nincompoops."

"Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: 'Quick! Quick! Quick!' And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed."

"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."

"Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us."

"Man kills without ceasing, to nourish himself; but since in addition he needs to kill for pleasure, he has invented the chase! The child kills the insects he finds, the little birds, all the little animals that come in his way. But this does not suffice for the irresistible need of massacre that is in us. It is not enough to kill beasts; we must kill man too. Long ago this need was satisfied by human sacrifice. Now, the necessity of living in society has made murder a crime. We condemn and punish the assassin! But as we cannot live without yielding to this natural and imperious instinct of death, we relieve ourselves from time to time, by wars. Then a whole nation slaughters another nation. It is a feast of blood, a feast that maddens armies and intoxicates the civilians, women and children, who read, by lamplight at night, the feverish story of massacre."

"Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries."

"Military men are the scourges of the world."

"Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [Was He Mad?]"

"Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror."

"No one looked at her, no one thought of her. She felt herself swallowed up in the scorn of these virtuous creatures, who had first sacrificed, then rejected her as a thing useless and unclean."

"Norbert de Varenne Went on: No, you do not understand me now, But later on Will you remember what I am saying to you at this time. A day comes, and it comes early for Many, When there is year-end to mirth, for behind everything one sees one looks at death. Even You do not understand the word. At your age it Means nothing, at me it is terrible. Yes, one understands it all at once, one does not know how or why, and THEN ITS aspect everything in life changes. For fifteen years I have felt death assail me as if I bore me some gnawing Beast Within. decaying I have felt myself little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house crumbling to ruin. Completely Death has disfigured me so that I do not recognize myself. I no longer have anything about me of myself - of the fresh, strong man I was at thirty. Whiten my death I have seen black hairs, and with what skillful and spiteful slowness. firm Death has Taken my skin, my muscles, my teeth, my whole body of old, only leaving me a despairing soul, soon to be Taken too. Every step brings me nearer to death, every movement, His every breath hastens odious work. To breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work, dream, everything we do is to die. To live, in short, is to die. Oh, Will you realize this. If you stop and think for Will you understand the point. What do you Expect? Love? A few more kisses and you Will Be impotent. Then money? For what? Women? Much Fun That Will Be! In order to eat a lot and grow fat and lie awake at night Suffering from gout? And After That? Glory? use What Is That When it does not take the form of love? And After That? Death is always the end. near to death I now see that I want to stretch my arms Often to push it back. It covers the earth and FILLS the universe. I see it everywhere. The insects crushed on the path, the falling leaves, the white hair in a friend's head, rend my heart and cry to me, 'Behold it!' It spoils for me all I do, all I see, all that I eat and drink, all that I love, the bright moonlight, the sunrise, the broad ocean, the noble rivers, and the soft summer evening air to breath so sweet."

"One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death."

"Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist."

"Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."

"Put black on white."

"She realized for the first time that two people can never reach eachothers? deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone."

"She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a caf‚ after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that."