Great Throughts Treasury

"The Americans who are the most efficient people on earth... have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a... conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider more important matters of big business and fornication."

"The artist gets a peculiar sensation from something he sees, and is impelled to express it and, he doesn?t know why, he can only express his feeling by lines and colors. It?s like a musician; he?ll read a line or two, and a certain combination of notes presents itself to him: he doesn?t know why such and such words call forth in him such and such notes; they just do. And I?ll tell you another reason why criticism is meaningless: a great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it; but in the next generation another painter sees the world in another way, and then the public judges him not by himself but by his predecessor. So the Barbizon people taught our fathers to look at trees in a certain manner, and when Monet came along and painted differently, people said: But trees aren?t like that. It never struck them that trees are exactly how a painter chooses to see them. We paint from within outwards?if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don?t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don?t attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it."

"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill."

"The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself."

"The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practice them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self?evident to the foreigner are absurd."

"The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. 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. 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. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness."

"The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members."

"The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces."

"The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain."

"The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth's crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing color and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can't make it anything but fragile. If you drop in on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn't possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?"

"The belief of God is not a matter of common sense, or logic, or argument, but of feeling. It is as impossible to prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no need of such an idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from. Yet I can imagine that at some future date I may believe in God; but it will be as now, when I don't believe in Him, not a matter of reasoning or of observation, but only of feeling."

"The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening."

"The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment."

"The best style is the style you don't notice."

"The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste, artistic, and dull."

"The disadvantages and dangers of the author?s calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant...Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song, or a story, and having done this, be rid of it. The artist is the only free man."

"The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."

"The best to be said for it is that when you've come to the conclusion that something is inevitable, all you can do is to make the best of it."

"The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed."

"The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead."

"The degree of a nation's civilization is marked by its disregard for the necessities of existence."

"The devil is a good actor, smiled Domingo."

"The extraordinariness of a man's life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate."

"The fact was that he had ceased to believe not for this reason or the other, but because he had not the religious temperament."

"The Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility."

"The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety."

"The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life."

"The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth."

"The first time he talked in that way he said something that I've never forgotten, because it horrified me; he said that the world isn't a creation, for out of nothing nothing comes, but a manifestation of the eternal nature; well, that was all right, but then he added that evil is as direct a manifestation of the divine as good. They were strange words to hear in that sordid, noisy caf‚, to the accompaniment of dance tunes on the mechanical piano."

"The door opened and Michael Gosselyn looked up. Julia came in."

"The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect."

"The facts are poor storytellers. Empienzan history by chance, usually long before the beginning, wander and decay inconsequential, they hung without leaving any final conclusion. They work an interesting situation and leave it in the air to go with another that has nothing to do. Do not know what is the climax and dramatic effects reject as irrelevant."

"The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now."

"The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words, and however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending."

"The goal is liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed form eternity and when at least it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea, and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, till at least it reaches the boundless seas from which it rose. But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality."

"The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected."

"The great have no friends, dear Blasco. It is the price they must pay for their greatness."

"The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love."

"The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you."

"The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes."

"The great critic ? must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things."

"The human race, like drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy."

"The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint."

"The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows."

"The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them."

"The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them."

"The important thing is character. It's my character I've got to mold. I'm sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It's only a matter of will."

"The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have a choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe it was inevitable from all eternity.' 'What do you deduce from that?' 'Why merely the futility of regret. It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."