Great Throughts Treasury

"Man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table."

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."

"Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love."

"Like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it."

"Like many another member of the gentle sex, she seems to have been ready enough to accept the perquisites of her position, but saw no reason why she should be asked to give anything in return."

"Love is what happens to a man and woman who don't know each other."

"Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species."

"Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists."

"Luxury is dangerous to people who have never known it and to whom its temptations are held out too suddenly? Just as the advantage of culture is that it enables you to talk nonsense with distinction, so the habit of luxury allows you to regard its frills and furbelows with a proper contumely."

"Make him [the reader] laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured."

"Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe."

"Men are passionate, men are weak, men are stupid, men are pitiful; to bring to bear on them anything so tremendous as the wrath of God seems strangely inept"

"Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it."

"Melville, by his own account, spent four months in the valley. He was well treated. He made friends with a girl called Fayaway, swam and boated with her, and except for his fear of being eaten was happy enough."

"Men have always formed gods in their own image."

"Maybe when his life ends do not let your time on earth deeper than a song thrown into the river leaves on the water surface signals."

"MARTHA: I thought you loved her. BERNARD: Enough to want her happiness above all things. MARTHA: You are forty-five, aren?t you? I forgot that for a moment. BERNARD: Dear Martha. You have such an attractive way of putting things."

"Man is always easier to sacrifice his life to learn the multiplication table."

"Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon."

"Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd."

"Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure."

"MERESTON: But you break my heart. LADY FREDERICK: My dear, men have said that to me ever since I was fifteen, but I've never noticed that in consequence they ate their dinner less heartily."

"Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves."

"Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it."

"Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable."

"Mighty is he who conquers himself."

"Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."

"Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection."

"Moodiness of luck to have one heart."

"Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters, and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station in life. They did the jobs they were paid to do more or less competently,. They were as happy with their wives as are most married couples. They led humdrum lives and did very much the same things every day. Sometimes by way of a change they got a little shooting; but at a rule, after they had done their day's work, they played tennis if there were people to play with, went to the club at sundown if there was a club in the vicinity, drank in moderation, and played bridge. They had their little tiffs, their little jealousies, their little flirtations, their little celebrations. They were good, decent, normal people. I respect, and even admire, such people, but they are not the sort of people I can write stories about. I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception."

"Mr. Harrington was a bore. He exasperated Ashenden, and enraged him; he got on his nerves, and drove him to frenzy. But Ashenden did not dislike him. His self-satisfaction was enormous but so ingenuous that you could not resent it; his conceit was so childlike that you could only smile at it."

"My dear, I'm a very immoral person, I answered. When I'm really fond of anyone, though I deplore his wrongdoing it doesn't make me less fond of him. You're not a bad woman in your way and you have every grace and every charm. I don't enjoy your beauty any the less because I know how much it owes to the happy combination of perfect taste and ruthless determination. You only lack one thing to make you completely enchanting. She smiled and waited. Tenderness."

"Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does."

"My dear, I don't know that in life it matters so much what you do as what you are. No one can learn by the experience of another because no circumstances are quite the same. If we made rather a hash of things perhaps it was because we were rather trivial people. You can do anything in this world if you're prepared to take the consequences, and the consequences depends on character."

"Music is queer. Its power seems unrelated to the other affections of man, so that a person who is elsewhere perfectly commonplace may have for it an extreme and delicate sensitiveness."

"My instinct told me I'd be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard."

"My dear, you used to be quite a dish; now you're quite a tureen."

"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."

"My motto is, leave me alone. He was thankful not to have to believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless. Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. (the whole world was like a sick-house, and there was no rhyme or reason in it)"

"Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can."

"My native gifts are not remarkable, but I have a certain force of character which has enabled me in a measure to supplement my deficiencies. I have common-sense. Most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in the front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating. For many years I have been described as a cynic; I told the truth. I wish no one to take me for other than I am, and on the other hand I see no need to accept others' pretenses."

"No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul."

"No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk -handsome, twenty-two year old."

"Nature has neither love nor hate, and with indifference smiles upon the light at heart and to the heavy brings a deeper sorrow."

"No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman."

"No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind."

"No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clich?s that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well-worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood."

"No one ever died of love yet, said the prioress with a savage bitterness."

"No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service from the well-beloved, and no service is so repulsive that love cannot make it delightful and easy."