Great Throughts Treasury

"None was more indifferent to convention than herself, and the marriage tie especially excited her ridicule, but she despised entirely those who disregarded the by-laws of society, yet lacked courage to suffer the results of their boldness: to seek the good opinion of the world, and yet secretly to act counter to its idea of decorum, was a very contemptible hypocrisy."

"No. He hesitated and his voice was strange. I despise myself."

"Nothing, I suppose, exasperates a woman more than the sexual desire for her of a man who is physically repellent to her, and when, to put it bluntly, he will not take no for an answer, she may very well come to hate him."

"Nothing in the world is permanent, and we?re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we?re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy."

"Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

"Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."

"Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it..."

"Now listen. If I think he?s awful we?ll just talk about the weather and the crops for a few minutes and then we?ll have an ominous pause and stare at him. That always makes a man feel a perfect fool and the moment a man feels a fool he gets up and goes."

"Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer, said Lawson. What has nature got to do with it? No one knows what?s in nature and what isn?t! The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist. Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended. It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were colored, and by Heaven, sir, they were black. If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint glass red and cows blue, it?ll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue."

"Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."

"Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it."

"Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life."

"Oh, my dear boy, one mustn't expect gratitude. It's a thing that no one has a right to. After all, you do good because it gives you pleasure. It's the purest form of happiness there is. To expect thanks for it is really asking too much. If you get it, well, it's like a bonus on shares on which you've already received a dividend; it's grand, but you mustn't look upon it as your due."

"Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist. They?ve got nothing to do with one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother ? well, it shows they?re excellent sons, but it?s no excuse for bad work. They?re only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse."

"Oh, my dear, you mustn?t be offended just because I?ve taken away from you the satisfaction of thinking that you have been deceiving me all these months."

"Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth."

"Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you. Didn't you mean them? At the moment."

"Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long."

"One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her."

"One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul."

"On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment."

"One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbor's."

"Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it."

"One idealizes people when they're away, it's true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when one sees them again one's often surprised that one saw anything in them at all."

"One of the odd things about Stendhal is that though he was always on the watch lest anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly making a fool of himself."

"One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly."

"Our wise old church...has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you."

"Partly for pleasure, and because it?s a habit and I?m just as uncomfortable if I don?t read as if I don?t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I?ve got out of the book all that?s any use to me, and I can?t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one?s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one and at last the flower is there."

"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labor."

"Passion doesn?t count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O?Shea. And if it doesn?t destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one?s life, that one?s brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one?s expended all one?s tenderness, poured out all the riches of one?s soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one?s dreams, who wasn?t worth a stick of chewing gum."

"Passion doesn't count the cost. ? Passion is destructive."

"Passion is destructive; if it does not destroy, it dies."

"Passion may be false, trivial or unnatural, but, if violent enough, is not without some trace of grandeur."

"Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world."

"Peace of mind: Thou shalt have it only the answer seemed to come to me, when thou has ceased to desire it."

"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."

"People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are."

"People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves; it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]"

"Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved."

"Perfection has one grave defect. It is apt to be dull."

"People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognize it."

"Perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace."

"Perfection is what American women expect to find in their husbands... but English women only hope to find in their butlers."

"Perhaps his taciturnity hid a contempt for the human race which had abandoned the great dreams of his youth and now wallowed in sluggish ease; or perhaps these thirty years of revolution had taught him that men are unfit for liberty, and he thought that he had spent his life in the pursuit of that which was not worth the finding. Or maybe he was tired out and waited only with indifference for the release of death."

"Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi."

"Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father's steps, and look neither to the right nor to the left."

"Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died."

"Philip got up and knelt down to say his prayers. It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realize that he was a creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshippers."

"Philip that there were three things to find out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man's relation."

"Philip himself asked desperately what was the use of living at all. It all seemed inane. It was the same with Cronshaw: it was quite unimportant that he had lived; he was dead and forgotten; his life seemed to have served nothing except to give a pushing journalist occasion to write an article in a review. And Philip cried out in his soul: 'What is the use of it?' The effort was so incommensurate with the result. The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment. Pain and disease and unhappiness weighed down the scale so heavily. What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."