Theodore Dreiser Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
It is a sad thing to want for happiness, but it is a terrible thing to see another groping about blindly for it, when it is almost within the grasp.

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
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
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
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
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
Our civilisation is still in a 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
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
The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most capable.

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
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
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