Theodore Dreiser Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

Theodore Dreiser
I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

Theodore Dreiser
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Theodore Dreiser
When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.

Theodore Dreiser
The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation—to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.

Theodore Dreiser
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance, an envelope to pocket him from the unescapable and unstable illimitable.

Theodore Dreiser
And then he sank back and tried, as usual, not to think. He must succeed. That's what the world was made for. That's what he was made for. That was what he would have to do.

Theodore Dreiser
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

Theodore Dreiser
People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.

Theodore Dreiser
Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.

Theodore Dreiser
Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action—its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money's sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control—for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power.

Theodore Dreiser
Nature, machine-like, works definitely and heartlessly, if in the main beautifully. Hence, if we, as individuals, do not make this dream of a god or what he stands for us real in our thoughts and deeds, then he is not real or true.

Theodore Dreiser
Life is made for the strong. There is no mercy in it for the weak– none...Such is the tragedy of desire.

Theodore Dreiser
We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.

Theodore Dreiser
Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.

Theodore Dreiser
The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.

Theodore Dreiser
To the untraveled, territory other than their own familiar heath is invariably fascinating. Next to love it is the one thing that solaces and delights.

Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

Theodore Dreiser
Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

Theodore Dreiser
The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended.

Theodore Dreiser
A real flame of love is a subtle thing. It burns as a will-o'-the-wisp, dancing onward to fairy lands of delight. It roars as a furnace. Too often jealousy is the quality upon which it feeds.

Theodore Dreiser
Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

Theodore Dreiser
The Irish are a practical and philosophic race. Their first and strongest instinct is to make the best of a bad situation — to put a better face on evil than it will normally wear.

Theodore Dreiser
I acknowledge the Furies, I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.

Theodore Dreiser
A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.

Theodore Dreiser
Our civilization is still in the middle stage: scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Theodore Dreiser
In your rocking chair by your window shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.

Theodore Dreiser
The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the souffulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.

Theodore Dreiser
Remember, love is all a woman has to give, but it is the only thing which God permits us to carry beyond the grave.

Theodore Dreiser
She had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. Innate sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there. Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor again in the most accurate.

Theodore Dreiser