Top 90 Theodore Dreiser Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I was a moral coward, and he was not losing his life and desires through fear – which the majority of us do.”

— Theodore Dreiser

52. “He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.”

— Theodore Dreiser

53. “She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.”

— Theodore Dreiser

54. “Shakespeare, I come !”

— Theodore Dreiser

55. “As they sang, this nondescript and indifferent street audience gazed, held by the peculiarity of such an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism and apathy of life.”

— Theodore Dreiser

56. “I believe in the compelling power of love.”

— Theodore Dreiser

57. “It was that old mass yearning for a likeness in all things that troubled them, and him.”

— Theodore Dreiser

58. “How dismal is progress without publicity.”

— Theodore Dreiser

59. “I was in Chicago before I came here, but I didn’t do so very much dancing. I had to work.” He was thinking how such girls as she had everything, as contrasted with girls like Roberta, who had nothing. And yet, as he now felt in this instance, he liked Roberta better. She was sweeter and warmer and kinder – not so cold.”

— Theodore Dreiser

60. “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 delight is like the mirage in the heavens, only plain to the eye outside; within is nothing.”

— Theodore Dreiser

61. “The strong man wants to be allowed to DO; the little man wants to stop him.”

— Theodore Dreiser

Featured in: Strong Quotes

62. “Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional nature – the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels. Of one come the men of action – generals and statesmen; of the other, the poets and dreamers – artists all.”

— Theodore Dreiser

63. “People like money even more than they do looks.”

— Theodore Dreiser

64. “For these local families of distinction were convinced that not only one’s family but one’s wealth was the be-all and end-all of every happy union meant to include social security. And in consequence, while considering Clyde as one who was unquestionably eligible socially, still, because it had been whispered about that his means were very slender, they were not inclined to look upon him as one who might aspire to marriage with any of their daughters.”

— Theodore Dreiser

65. “Morality and ethics are nothing but footballs, wherewith people, strong people play to win points.”

— Theodore Dreiser

Featured in: Strong Quotes

66. “The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation.”

— Theodore Dreiser

67. “Raw, glittering force, however, compounded of the cruel Machiavellianism of nature, if it is to be but Machiavellian, seems to exercise a profound attraction for the conventionally rooted. Your cautious citizen of average means, looking out through the eye of his dull world of seeming fact, is often the first to forgive or condone the grim butcheries of theory by which the strong rise.”

— Theodore Dreiser

68. “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 hand closed over a something that was not to be felt nor longer seen, mere colored air.”

— Theodore Dreiser

69. “Only in rare instances and with rare individuals does there seem to be any guiding light from within.”

— Theodore Dreiser

70. “Dusk – of a summer night.”

— Theodore Dreiser

71. “What followed then was what invariably follows in the wake of every tortured consciousness. From what it dreads or hates, yet knows or feels to be unescapable, it takes refuge in that which may be hoped for – or at least imagined.”

— Theodore Dreiser

72. “Yet because of the ignorance and stupidity of so many of those about him, he was able to consider himself at least fairly learned.”

— Theodore Dreiser

73. “Days were going – going. But life – life – how was one to do without that – the beauty of the days – of the sun and rain – of work love, energy, desire. Why say to him so constantly now did to resolve all his care in divine mercy and think only of God, when now, now, was all?”

— Theodore Dreiser

74. “He liked it, the idea of self-duplication. It was almost acquisitive, this thought.”

— Theodore Dreiser

75. “Like the large majority of those who profess and daily repeat the dogmas and creeds of the world, she had come into her practices and imagined attitude so insensibly from her earliest childhood on, that up to this time, and even later, she did not know the meaning of it all.”

— Theodore Dreiser

76. “A man, to hold his position, must have a dignified manner, a clean record, a respectable home anchorage.”

— Theodore Dreiser

77. “One of his self–imposed tasks was to go about the house after Lester, or the servants, turning out the gas–jets or electric–light bulbs which might accidentally have been left burning. That was a sinful extravagance.”

— Theodore Dreiser

78. “The “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible.”

— Theodore Dreiser

79. “The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due – that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege – many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed.”

— Theodore Dreiser

80. “I am as rich as I was, and only a little older.”

— Theodore Dreiser

81. “It was given unto you to know the Peace of God,” he insisted, quoting Paul and thereafter sentences from Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, on how easy it was – if Clyde would but repeat and pray as he had asked him to – for him to know and delight in the “peace that passeth all understanding.”

— Theodore Dreiser

82. “Transplantation is not always successful in the matter of flowers or maidens.”

— Theodore Dreiser

83. “Guards knew when blue devils had seized the inmates of these cages. They couldn’t eat. And there were times, too, when even guards couldn’t eat.”

— Theodore Dreiser

84. “Clyde had a soul that was not destined to grow up. He lacked decidedly that mental clarity and inner directing application that in so many permits them to sort out from the facts and avenues of life the particular thing or things that make for their direct advancement.”

— Theodore Dreiser

85. “Like an addict, he needed to do whatever he could to ease his pain. Anything to relieve his mental distress, to satisfy his craving for comfort. He must do it. No thoughts about tomorrow.”

— Theodore Dreiser

86. “Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things.”

— Theodore Dreiser

87. “But, oh, gentlemen, the ways of nature, or of God, and the Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may! It is man who proposes, but God – God – who disposes!”

— Theodore Dreiser

88. “Chapter I The Philadelphia into which Frank Algernon Cowperwood was born was a city of two hundred and fifty thousand and more. It was set with handsome parks, notable buildings, and crowded with historic memories. Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in existence – the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer, city delivery of mails.”

— Theodore Dreiser

89. “People,” he said, “don’t worry about people. People think what you want them to think.”

— Theodore Dreiser

90. “You have heard him called a man – a bearded man – a criminal and a crime-soaked product of the darkest vomiting of Hell.”

— Theodore Dreiser

91. “It was that halcyon hour when the Angelus falls like a benediction upon the waning day. Far off the notes were sounding gently, and nature, now that she listened, seemed to have paused also. A scarlet–breasted robin was hopping in short spaces upon the grass before her. A humming bee hummed, a cow–bell tinkled, while some suspicious cracklings told of a secretly reconnoitering squirrel.”

— Theodore Dreiser

92. “You felt no sorrow? No shame? Then?” “Yes, shame, maybe. Maybe sorrow, too, a little. I knew it was terrible. I felt that it was, of course. But still – you see – ” “Yes, I know. That Miss X. You wanted to get away.” “Yes – but mostly I was frightened, and I didn’t want to help her.” “Yes! Yes! Tst! Tst! Tst! If she drowned you could go to that Miss X. You thought of that?” The Reverend McMillan’s lips were tightly and sadly compressed. “Yes.” “My son! My son! In your heart was murder then.”

— Theodore Dreiser

93. “His eyes expressed the difficulty he felt.”

— Theodore Dreiser

94. “I know that as you gentlemen view such things, such conduct has no excuse for being. One may be the victim of an internal conflict between two illicit moods, yet nevertheless, as the law and the church see it, guilty of sin and crime. But the truth, none-the-less, is that they do exist in the human heart, law or no law, religion or no religion, and in scores of cases they motivate the actions of the victims. And we admit that they motivated the actions of Clyde Griffiths.”

— Theodore Dreiser

95. “Well, here is one who, whatever her defects, probably does what she believes as nearly as possible.”

— Theodore Dreiser

96. “How could they judge him, these people, all or any one of them, even his own mother, when they did not know what his own mental, physical and spiritual suffering had been? And.”

— Theodore Dreiser

97. “Never? That’s a hard word when it comes to whisky.”

— Theodore Dreiser

98. “The clear proof of one overt deed was the cold breath needed to convert the lowering clouds of suspicion into a rain of wrath.”

— Theodore Dreiser

99. “There’s no explaining a good woman,” he said to himself.”

— Theodore Dreiser