Jenny Gerhardt - Theodore Dreiser

To be a forceful figure in the business world means, as a rule, that you must be an individual of one idea, and that idea the God-given one that life has destined you for a tremendous future in the particular field you have chosen. It means that one thing, a cake of soap, a new can-opener, a safety razor, or speed-accelerator, must seize on your imagination with tremendous force, burn as a raging flame, and make itself the be-all and end-all of your existence. As a rule, a man needs poverty to help him to this enthusiasm, and youth.
The thing he has discovered, and with which he is going to busy himself, must be the door to a thousand opportunities and a thousand joys.
Happiness must be beyond or the fire will not burn as brightly as it might—the urge will not be great enough to make a great success.

She was a significant type emotionally.
There was something there—artistically, temperamentally, which was far and beyond the keenest suspicion of the herd.
He did not know himself quite what it was, but he felt a largeness of feeling not altogether squared with intellect, or perhaps better yet, experience, which was worthy of any man's desire.
"This remarkable girl," he thought, seeing her clearly in his mind's eye.

There is a fate in love and a fate in fight.

It is in such supreme moments that growth is greatest.
It comes as with a vast surge, this feeling of strength and sufficiency.
We may still tremble, the fear of doing wretchedly may linger, but we grow.
Flashes of inspiration come to guide the soul.

People turn so quickly from weakness or the shadow of it.
To get away from failure—even the mere suspicion of it—that seems to be a subconscious feeling with the average man and woman; we all avoid non-success as though we fear that it may prove contagious.

How a mind under such uncertain circumstances could retain so comparatively placid a vein is one of those marvels which find their explanation in the inherent trustfulness of the spirit of youth.
It is not often that the minds of men retain the perceptions of their younger days.
The marvel is not that one should thus retain, but that any should ever lose them Go the world over, and after you have put away the wonder and tenderness of youth what is there left? The few sprigs of green that sometimes invade the barrenness of your materialism, the few glimpses of summer which flash past the eye of the wintry soul, the half hours off during the long tedium of burrowing, these reveal to the hardened earth-seeker the universe which the youthful mind has with it always.
No fear and no favor; the open fields and the light upon the hills; morning, noon, night; stars, the bird-calls, the water's purl—these are the natural inheritance of the mind of the child.
Men call it poetic, those who are hardened fanciful.

"Conceived in iniquity and born in sin," is the unnatural interpretation put upon the process by the extreme religionist, and the world, by its silence, gives assent to a judgment so marvelously warped.
Surely there is something radically wrong in this attitude.
The teachings of philosophy and the deductions of biology should find more practical application in the daily reasoning of man.
No process is vile, no condition is unnatural.

Not every mind is to be estimated by the weight of a single folly; not every personality is to be judged by the drag of a single passion.
We live in an age in which the impact of materialized forces is well-nigh irresistible; the spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock.
The tremendous and complicated development of our material civilization, the multiplicity, and variety of our social forms, the depth, subtlety, and sophistry of our imaginative impressions, gathered, remultiplied, and disseminated by such agencies as the railroad, the express and the post-office, the telephone, the telegraph, the newspaper, and, in short, the whole machinery of social intercourse—these elements of existence combine to produce what may be termed a kaleidoscopic glitter, a dazzling and confusing phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the mental and moral nature.
It induces a sort of intellectual fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited.
Our modern brain-pan does not seem capable as yet of receiving, sorting, and storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily.
The white light of publicity is too white.
We are weighed upon by too many things.
It is as if the wisdom of the infinite were struggling to beat itself into finite and cup-big minds.

Love was not enough in this world—that was so plain. One needed education, wealth, training, the ability to fight and scheme

I've got to be thirsty when I'm led to water.