Theodore Dreiser — Quotes from Author's Books

Nature is unkind in permitting the minor type to bear a child at all.

One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value.

That’s the trouble with people who don’t know. They’re always guessing.

Take things as they come and make the best of them.

How much the average home depends upon the mother was seen when it was feared the end was near.

There are natures born to the inheritance of flesh that come without understanding, and that go again without seeming to have wondered why.

There was something in sensual desire which superseded and therefore must be superior to reason and will.

Life went with beauty and desire; where they were not was nothing.

Only he who meditates can realize truth.

Do good for its own sake. Then alone will come perfect non-attachment.

When you help the poor, feel not the slightest pride.
Be thankful for the opportunity to give.

The world is full of desirable situations, but, unfortunately, we can occupy but one at a time. It doesn’t do us any good to wring our hands over the far-off things.

You are not educated when merely you are well-schooled.
You are truly educated only when you are enlightened by inner truth.
For inner truth takes dead facts and makes them live; it inspires the heart to the use of knowledge for the service of others.
It is through the heart, not the intellect, that the Lord is seen.

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.

We are never born and we never die.
Each atom is a living thing, leading its own independent life.
These atoms combine into groups for an end, and the groups manifest a group intelligence, so long as it remains a group, these groups again combining in turn and forming bodies of a more complex nature, which serve as vehicles for higher forms of consciousness.
When death comes to the physical body, the cells separate and scatter and that which we call decay sets in.
The force which held the cells together is withdrawn, and they become free to go their own way and to form new combinations.

Beauty—that wraith of perfection that came and went as a shadow.