"Primrose path" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assist them in their calculations, by carrying them into certain gaols and nightly refuges I know of, where my own heart dies within me, when I see thousands of immortal creatures condemned, without alternative or choice, to tread, not what our great poet calls the "primrose path" to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jaded flints and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance, and held together, like the solid rocks, by years of this ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... primrose path, which is always an imperceptible but easy down-slope, Io went farther than she had ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I said then. 'If there's nothing, after all, in this climb-though-the-rocks-be-rugged stuff, no great harm done. I'm still young. But why waste more valuable time? I'll try Broadway,' I said. 'I'll have a whirl at the primrose path.' ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... the most rapid life of Paris. She can never escape it, save by becoming a nun, which is not at all probable with her manners and tastes. She has only one possible career, a life of pleasure. She will come to it sooner or later, if indeed she has not already begun to tread its primrose path. She cannot escape her fate. From being a young girl she will take the inevitable step, quite simply. And I would like to be ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... reflections about sun-stroke by day; and even moments most devoted to the object of my heart's aspirations were fettered by the very philosophic idea, that it could never detract from the pleasure of the happiness that awaited me, if I travelled on the primrose path to its attainment. I argued thus: if Lady Jane be true—if—if, in a word, I am destined to have any success in the Callonby family, then will a day or two more not risk it. My present friends I shall, of course, take leave ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... whatever food of beauty and emotion and knowledge comes his way is obvious to any fool. But whether, in what I propose, I'm giving a helping hand to a kind of wild genius, or whether I'm starting a vain boy along the primrose path in the direction of everlasting bonfire, I'm damned ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... to do, never knew the thorns with which the path of letters is apt to be strewn. A mistress of the great art of pleasing made knowledge from the first a primrose path to him. Sparkling all over with intelligence, she impregnated her boy with it. She made herself his favorite companion; she would not keep her distance. She stole and coaxed knowledge and goodness into his heart and mind ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... unhappy, and he dies in peace. Bunyan has made him a brute, because such men do become brutes. It is the real punishment of brutal and selfish habits. There the figure stands—a picture of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most familiar; travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Pleasures are to be found among the primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by. Yet the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... that he "would never lift up his hand against his father Parmenides." The fathers of the Church have not been so respectfully treated by literary forgers during the Renaissance. The 'Flowers of Theology' of St. Bernard, which were to be a primrose path ad gaudia Paradisi (Strasburg, 1478), were really, it seems, the production of Jean de Garlande. Athanasius, his 'Eleven Books concerning the Trinity,' are attributed to Vigilius, a colonial Bishop in Northern Africa. Among false classics were ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... countless millions of men (and women, too, for that matter) have kept in the straight and narrow path because they were afraid to step out of it. It may be that they were, intrinsically, no better men than the ones who trod the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, but they were much easier to live with. And the man who is courteous, who is a gentleman, whatever his motives, is a more agreeable citizen than the one who ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... There is nothing against it. The others, the workers, are imperturbable in their good-humour. Their outraged cells leave them profoundly indifferent. There are no brawls to fear, no protests. Now or never is the moment to tread the primrose path. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... biological progress in this country. It is now high time, so far as the so-called mutation hypothesis, based on the conduct of the evening primrose in cultures, is concerned, that the younger generation of biologists should take heed lest the primrose path of dalliance lead them imperceptibly into the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire."—Prof. Edw. C. Jeffrey (Harvard), ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... primrose path of dalliance. He fought his way inch by inch. Often it was a dozen to one against him. In one speech he said: "The minister comes down in state attended by beasts clean and unclean. He opens his budget and edifies us with a speech—one-half the house goes away. A second gentleman ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... heart. Was he always to love no one but Warrington? It is fine to be a bachelor when one is young; but when the years multiply, when there are no new junkets and old ones grow stale, when scenes change, when friends drop out one by one, when a younger generation usurps the primrose path of dalliance, ah! the world becomes a dreary place. The old bachelor is the loneliest and most pathetic ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath |
