Great Throughts Treasury

"A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life."

"All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it."

"Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies: for solitude is essential to man. All men come into their world alone; all leave it alone."

"There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move; the first is a rudder, the second an oar or sail. The first speaks to the ere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy."

"Friends are as dangerous as enemies."

"Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man."

"In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage."

"A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made."

"A long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter."

"Being both dramatic author and dramatic performer, he found himself heir to a twofold opprobrium, and at an era of English society when the weight of that opprobrium was heaviest."

"And here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma:??Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader?s patience, by such a detail of my malady, and of my struggles with it, as might suffice to establish the fact of my inability to wrestle any longer with irritation or constant suffering: or, on the other hand, by passing lightly over this critical part of my story, I must forego the benefit of a stronger impression left on the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to the misconstruction of having slipped by the easy and gradual steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to the final stage of opium-eating."

"Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed . . . The true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power."

"Allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents for missing."

"All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite... Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been."

"Bentley wrote a letter ? upon the scriptural glosses in our present copies of Hesychius, which he considered interpolations from a later hand."

"But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humors, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper."

"Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep."

"Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures."

"Connected with this sleep was a little incident, which served ... to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart?or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness."

"Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells me that the crocodile does not change,?that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. That may be; but the reason is that the crocodile does not live fast?he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood among naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads."

"Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else."

"Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them."

"Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state."

"Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them."

"Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated - everlasting farewells!"

"Far beyond all other political powers of Christianity is the demiurgic power of this religion over the kingdoms of human opinion."

"Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children -- honored as the jewelry of God only by them -- when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these."

"Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism."

"For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual;"

"Generally, the rare people who caused my disgust to that world, there were people flourishing socially and with good reputation, As for mascara that I met, and are not few, I think all of them without exception with pleasure and kindness."

"Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities."

"Here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail."

"Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)? Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness."

"I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries."

"I cannot think that any man could ever tower upward into a very great philosopher unless he should begin or end with Christianity. - A great man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel. - An intellect of the highest order must build on Christianity."

"I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it is, that I have drawn it up: and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honorable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities."

"If I could have foreseen the hurricane, the perfect hail-storm of affliction which soon fell upon me, well might I have been agitated. To this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast, and in some degrees a medicine."

"Ideas! There is no occasion for them; all that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language of representative feelings."

"It is an impressive truth that sometimes in the very lowest forms of duty, less than which would rank a man as a villain, there is, nevertheless, the sublimest ascent of self-sacrifice. To do less would class you as an object of eternal scorn; to do so much presumes the grandeur of heroism."

"If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the Incommunicable. And if another Sphinx should arise to propose another enigma to man?saying, what burden is that which only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should answer at once: It is the burden of the Incommunicable"

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time."

"It is remarkable, however, that at the very lowest point of Kant's depression, when he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography. Chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler?s, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,?even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear)."

"It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety."

"It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London."

"It was not by an insolent usurpation that Coleridge persisted in monology through his whole life."

"Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep."

"Lyrical emotion of every kind, which must be in the state of flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, requires the Saxon element of our language."

"Kant ate but once a day, and drank no beer. Of this liquor, (I mean the strong black beer,) he was, indeed, the most determined enemy. If ever a man died prematurely, Kant would say??He has been drinking beer, I presume."

"Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind against the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who, with a handsome person, would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquilizing smiles of continual admiration."

"Matched against the master of ?ologies? in our days, the most accomplished of Grecians is becoming what the Master had become long since in competition with the political economist."