Great Throughts Treasury

"The most infectiously joyous men and women are those who forget themselves in thinking about others and serving others. Happiness comes not by deliberately courting and wooing it but by giving oneself in self-effacing surrender to great values."

"The greatest danger that faces this country is the danger of moral lassitude - liberty turned to license, rights demanded and duties shirked, the moral sense deteriorating, the traditions and standards of the nation weakened, the spiritual forces within it losing ground."

"Get to know two things about a man - how he earns his money and how he spends it - and you have a clue to his character, for you have a searchlight that shows up the inmost recesses of his soul. You know all you need to know about his standards, his motives, his driving desires, his real religion."

"We have lose the habit of thinking quietly, of trying to know ourselves and our friends, and the world around us, and the God who is above and within us. We are looking in the wrong places for happiness. We are so exclusively occupied with material things and with their accumulation that the higher values are crowded out."

"We all crave happiness, and we have at hand the predisposing conditions which make it possible. Nevertheless, the fact remains that deliberately to pursue happiness is not the surest way of achieving it. Seek it for its own sake and I doubt whether you will find it."

"Crime rarely fails to make the headlines. How one wishes there were some way of featuring and dramatizing good living and high thinking."

"God is living in the circle of eternity, and we the [straight] line cut from the world must be hammered, bent and broken, to be re-forged into His circle."

"Deliberately to pursue happiness is not the surest way of achieving it. Seek it for its own sake and I doubt whether you will find it."

"We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls."