Great Throughts Treasury

"Beauty is only sin deep."

"And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night."

"And the sleeper, eye unlidding, heard a voice for ever bidding much farewell to Dolly Gray; turning weary on his truckle-bed he heard the honey-suckle lauded in apiarian lay. Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer. None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration. It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast."

"And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn ? I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night."

"Find yourself a cup of tea, the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things."

"Find yourself a cup; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things."

"His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect."

"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school."

"Behind his careful political flippancy and cynicism one might also detect a certain careless sincerity, which would probably in the long run save him from moderate success, and turn him into one of the brilliant failures of his day."

"By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine."

"Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk ? the eyes of a poet or a house agent."

"Children are given us to discourage our better emotions."

"Don?t interrupt me with your childish prattle: I?m writing deathless verse."

"Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own."

"I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly."

"I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayy m. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother. Lift-boys always have aged mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think."

"I hate babies. They're so human."

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

"I believe I take precedence: you are merely the Club bore: I am the Club liar."

"I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient, but it seems I asked too much of fate."

"I found everyone talking nervously and feverishly of the weather and the war in South Africa, except Reginald, who was reclining in a comfortable chair with the dreamy, far-away look that a volcano might wear just after it had desolated entire villages."

"I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got."

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

"It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast."

"It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country."

"It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score."

"It is one of the consolations of middle-aged reformers that the good they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all."

"It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas."

"It reminds me of the man I read about in some sacred book who was given a choice of what he most desired. And because he didn?t ask for titles and honors and dignities, but only for immense wealth, these things came to him also."

"Madame was not best pleased at being contradicted on a professional matter, and when Madame lost her temper you usually found it afterwards in the bill."

"Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses."

"It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent."

"Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte."

"People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes."

"Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her mistakes."

"People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime or a broken night's rest than ever they would to a broken heart."

"People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime than they ever would to a broken heart."

"Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact."

"Put that bloody cigarette out! [Last words, before being shot by a German sniper who'd heard the remark.]"

"Reginald in his wildest lapses into veracity never admits to being more than twenty-two."

"She took to telling the truth; she said she was forty-two and five months. It may have been pleasing to the angels, but her elder sister was not gratified."

"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II."

"Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage."

"Sredni Vashtar went forth, his thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white. His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful."

"Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason than that he didn't get one in December."

"The death of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts."

"The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went."

"The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time."

"The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other."

"The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistress."