Theodore Dreiser Quotes

43 quotes in 687 categories

• I will kneel and strike my breast, then touch the dust with my forehead; I will, I will. Only do not forsake me, oh god…
• 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…
• The strong man wants to be allowed to DO; the little man wants to stop him.
• Morality and ethics are nothing but footballs, wherewith people, strong people play to win points.
• We who feel that justice is not being done have but one thing to do: that is fight, by argument, by example, by insistence on…
• 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…
• Your writer, your scientist, your chief official, all have lost the power to revive the early illusion concerning fame and high place. Their beauty and…
• I have seen youths bright eyed and fair groping after bubbles in rapture, and conceiving them diamonds and the glitter of fine jewels, until their…
• 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…
• Shakespeare, I come !
• A thought will color a world for us.
• Life is made for the strong. There is no mercy in it for the weak– none...Such is the tragedy of desire.
• In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.
• The mystery of life--its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or…
• Innate sensuousness rarely has any desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of…
• It isn't myself that's important in this transaction apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation...all of us are more or less pawns. We're…
• You walk into a room, see a woman, and something happens. It's chemical. What are you going to do about it?
• Why must women torment me so?
• I believe in the compelling power of love.
• Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

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