Great Throughts Treasury

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. This is to be my symphony."

"A single hour a day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge."

"A man in earnest finds means, or if he cannot find, creates it."

"Be true to your own highest conviction."

"But the ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins."

"Courage considered in itself or without reference to its causes, is no virtue, and deserves no esteem"

"Difficulty is the element, and resistance the true work of a man."

"Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict."

"Beauty is an all-pervading presence. It unfolds to the numberless flowers of the Spring; it waves in the branches of the trees and in the green blades of grass; it haunts the depths of the earth and the sea, and gleams out in the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects, but the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and the setting sun all overflow with beauty. The universe is its temple; and those people who are alive to it cannot lift their eyes without feeling themselves encompassed with it on every side."

"Conscience is an oracle of the Divinity."

"Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie."

"Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do."

"Faith is the deep want of the soul. We have faculties for the spiritual, as truly as for the outward world. God, the foundation of all existence, may become to the mind the most real of all beings. The believer feels himself resting on an everlasting foundation."

"Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it."

"Even in evil, we discern rays of light and hope, and gradually come to see, in suffering and temptation, proofs and instruments of the sublimest purposes of wisdom and love."

"Happily in this community we all are bred and born to work; and this honorable mark, set on us all, should bind together the various portions of the community."

"He who possesses the divine powers of the soul is a great being, be his place what it may. You may clothe him with rags, may immure him in a dungeon, may chain him to slavish tasks. But he is still great."

"I affirm, and would maintain, that true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being."

"How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success."

"He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled."

"He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man."

"I do and I must reverence human nature. I bless it for its kind affections. I honor it for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are marks of a divine origin and the pledges of a celestial inheritance; and I thank God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race."

"Health is the working man's fortune, and he ought to watch over it more than the capitalist over his largest investments. Health lightens the efforts of body and mind. It enables a man to crowd much work into a narrow compass. Without it, little can be earned, and that little by slow, exhausting toil."

"I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused."

"Ideas are the mightiest influence on earth. One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him."

"I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves.... Indeed every man, in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions."

"In reverential sympathy with the mighty power around me, I became conscious of power within."

"Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused."

"It is a greater work to educate a child, in the true and larger sense of the word, than to rule a state."

"Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind."

"It is mind which does the work of the world, so that the more there is of mind, the more work will be accomplished."

"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds... In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books."

"Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power."

"Most joyful the Poet be; It is through him that all men see."

"Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life."

"It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity."

"It is better to plan less and do more."

"It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great."

"Life has a higher end, than to be amused."

"Let us teach that the honor of a nation consists not in the forced submission of other states, but in equal laws and free institutions, in cultivated fields and prosperous cities; in the development of intellectual and moral power, in the diffusion of knowledge, in magnanimity and justice, in the virtues and blessings of peace."

"Man's spiritual nature is no dream of theologians to vanish before the light of natural science. It is the grandest reality on earth."

"Literature ? the expression of a nation's mind in writing."

"No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent."

"No one should part with their individuality and become that of another."

"No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind."

"No calculations of interest, no schemes of policy can do the work of love, of the spirit of human brotherhood. There can be no peace without but through peace within."

"Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart."

"Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost."

"One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography."

"Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect of his less favored brothers."