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.

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

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

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

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

Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read “Dora Thorne,” or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now...

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. (attributed)

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.

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

Many individuals are so constituted that their only thought is to obtain pleasure and shun responsibility. They would like, butterfly-like, to wing forever in a summer garden, flitting from flower to flower, and sipping honey...

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the...

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.

[Honors: At his funeral, Charlie Chaplin read Dreiser’s poem,] The Road I Came. … American writing before and after his time differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin. He was a man...

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.