Great Throughts Treasury

"Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern."

"Real knowledge, like every thing else of the highest value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, studied for, thought for, and, more than all, it must be prayed for."

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself loses his misery."

"Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretive both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity."

"The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion. Not only to find oneself tyrannized over and outraged is a defeat to this instinct, but in general, to feel oneself over-tutored, over-governed, sate upon (as the popular phrase is) by authority, is a defeat to it."

"The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail."

"The true meaning of religion is not merely morality, but morality touched by emotion."

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things."

"Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men."

"Masses make movements, individualities explode them."

"Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming."

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."

"Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men’s spirits are indissolubly held."

"No one can give faith, unless he has faith; the persuaded persuade."

"Religion, that voice of the deepest human experience."

"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry."

"Religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself."

"To read to good purpose we must read a great deal, and be content not to use a great deal of what we read."

"The object of religion is conduct; and conduct is really, however men may overlay it with philosophical disquisitions, the simplest thing in the world. That is to say, it is the simplest thing in the world as far as understanding is concerned; as regards doing, it is the hardest thing in the world."

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive."

"And we forget because we must and not because we will."

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born."

"Choose equality."

"Greatness is a spiritual condition. "

"All good and beneficial prayer is… at bottom nothing else than an energy of aspiration towards the eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness, of aspiration towards it, and of cooperation with it."

"Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready."

"Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit."

"More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry."

"Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel [Shelley], beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

"A wanderer is a man from his birth, He was born in a ship On the breast of the river Time."

"Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood. One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude."

"Ah, love, let us be true to one another! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."

"Alas! is even love too weak to unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal to one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men conceal'd their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd they would by other men be met with blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest of men, and alien to themselves ? and yet the same heart beats in every human breast!"

"Ah, love, let us be ture to one another!"

"All pains the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, find their sole voice in that victorious brow."

"And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else."

"All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates."

"And amongst us one, who most has suffer?d, takes dejectedly his seat upon the intellectual throne."

"All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science."

"And long we try in vain to speak and act our hidden self, and what we say and do is eloquent, is well ? but ?tis not true!"

"And each day brings it's pretty dust, our soon-choked souls to fill and we forget because we must, and not because we will."

"And see all sights from pole to pole And glance, and nod, and bustle by, And never once possess our soul Before we die."

"And here we are as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night."

"All the live murmur of a summer's day."

"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty?s heightening."

"And then he thinks he knows the hills where his life rose, and the sea where it goes."

"And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, didst tread on earth unguess'd at. ? Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, find their sole speech in that victorious brow."

"And we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night."