Great Throughts Treasury

"Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul."

"Man is a hating rather than a loving animal."

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this."

"Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck."

"Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space."

"Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs."

"Motherhood is the strangest thing; it can be like being one's own Trojan horse."

"My work expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don"

"Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."

"Nothing succeeds like failure."

"Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed."

"Now King Alexander is driving down the familiar streets, curiously unguarded, in a curiously antique car. It can be seen from his attempt to make his stiff hand supple, from a careless flash of his careful black eyes, it can be seen that he is taking the cheers of the crowd with a childish seriousness. It is touching, like a girl putting full faith in the compliments that are paid to her at a ball."

"One Woman Can Change Anything. Many Women Can Change Everything."

"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."

"Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity."

"Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility."

"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

"Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep."

"She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it; she had evidently practiced whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life."

"She repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music"

"She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul."

"The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy."

"The bad is more easily perceived than the good."

"The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived."

"The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."

"The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it."

"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning."

"There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die."

"There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence."

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."

"The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him."

"The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots."

"The general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted."

"There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital."

"There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped."

"There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help with moving the piano."

"There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time."

"Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will."

"Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either."

"We disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously"

"We love people, and we say that we were going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less; indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred."

"We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits."

"Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death."

"Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman."

"Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously."

"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind."

"Yes, said Mamma, this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less; indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred."

"Yet it had been delicious to touch her grandfather's robe. It was as different from ordinary material as something sung from something spoken. In a way she liked her grandfather. Once she had seen children crawling under a circus-tent so that they could see the elephant, and she would have done that to see her grandfather; and what she like in him was the upside-downness of him, as this inverted luxury which gave him an everyday possession--for she supposed this robe was just a dressing gown--which was uniquely exquisite..."

"You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is."