Top 60 Theodore Dreiser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.”

— Theodore Dreiser

2. “How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.”

— Theodore Dreiser

3. “Nothing is proved, all is permitted.”

— Theodore Dreiser

4. “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

— Theodore Dreiser

5. “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

6. “Our civilization 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

7. “In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.”

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— Theodore Dreiser

11. “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

12. “Conservatism – hard work – saving one’s money – looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that.”

— Theodore Dreiser

13. “What a wretched thing it was to be born poor and not to have any one to do anything for you and not to be able to do so very much for yourself!”

— Theodore Dreiser

14. “A thought will color a world for us.”

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— Theodore Dreiser

16. “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

17. “All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?”

— Theodore Dreiser

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Oh, the moon is 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

22. “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

23. “When waters engulf us we reach for a star.”

— Theodore Dreiser

24. “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 of beauty.”

— Theodore Dreiser

25. “When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.”

— Theodore Dreiser

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

— Theodore Dreiser

27. “Theodore Dreiser Should ought to write nicer.”

— Theodore Dreiser

28. “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 circustance.”

— Theodore Dreiser

29. “You walk into a room, see a woman, and something happens. It’s chemical. What are you going to do about it?”

— Theodore Dreiser

30. “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

31. “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

32. “What did you lie to me.”

— Theodore Dreiser

33. “If we are to extract any joy out of our span, we must think and plan and make things better not only for ourselves but for others, since joy for ourselves depends upon our joy in others and theirs in us.”

— Theodore Dreiser

34. “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

35. “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

36. “If you have that unconquerable urge to write, nothing will stop you from writing.”

— Theodore Dreiser

37. “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

38. “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 fair play wherever we have the power to do so. The rest is in the hands of the Lord, or nature, which swings, apparently, from one extreme to another.”

— Theodore Dreiser

39. “In short, he was one of those early, daring manipulators who later were to seize upon other and even larger phases of American natural development for their own aggrandizement.”

— Theodore Dreiser

40. “Who were these people with money, and what had they done that they should enjoy so much luxury, where others as good seemingly as themselves had nothing? And wherein did these latter differ so greatly from the successful?”

— Theodore Dreiser

41. “Oh, blessed are the children of endeavor in this, that they try and are hopeful. And blessed also are they who, knowing, smile and approve.”

— Theodore Dreiser

42. “Depend upon it; from every condition of distress or evil, there is a great reaction, and the greater the distress or evil, the greater the reaction.”

— Theodore Dreiser

43. “All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again.”

— Theodore Dreiser

44. “And they were always testifying as to how God or Christ or Divine Grace had rescued them from this or that predicament – never how they had rescued any one else. And.”

— Theodore Dreiser

45. “The long drizzle had begun. Pedestrians had turned up collars and trousers at the bottom. Hands were hidden in the pockets of the umbrella-less – umbrellas were up. The street looked like a sea of round, black-cloth roofs, twisting, bobbing, moving. Trucks and vans were rattling in a noisy line, and everywhere men were shielding themselves as best they could.”

— Theodore Dreiser

46. “His brain was his office.”

— Theodore Dreiser

47. “It is an exceptional thing to find beauty, youth, compatibility, intelligence, your own point of view – softened and charmingly emotionalized – in another.”

— Theodore Dreiser

48. “Why must women torment me so?”

— Theodore Dreiser

49. “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

50. “She merely beamed a fatty beam. She was almost ponderous, and pink, with a tendency to a double chin.”

— Theodore Dreiser