Theodore Dreiser

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

— 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

Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash,On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— 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.

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— Theodore Dreiser

Shakespeare, I come!

— 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

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

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

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

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

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