Great Throughts Treasury

"The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings."

"The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression."

"The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets."

"The great success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people."

"The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment."

"The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it."

"The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss."

"The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual."

"The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal."

"The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own."

"The highest compact we can make with our fellow is, let there be truth between us two forevermore."

"The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them."

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God."

"The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do."

"The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him."

"The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon."

"The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he form whom meanness withholds some important benefit."

"The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation."

"The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed."

"The one thing in the world of value is the active soul."

"The only reward of virtue is virtue."

"The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it."

"The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is."

"The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it."

"The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men."

"The soul circumscribes all things. It contradicts all experiences. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable."

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."

"The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth... We are wiser than we know."

"The reward of a thing done well is to have done it."

"The soul knows no persons."

"The thief steals from himself."

"The true poem is the poet’s mind."

"The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption - pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they entertain - they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it."

"The street is full of humiliations to the proud."

"The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband."

"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure."

"The virtues of society are vices of the saint."

"The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool."

"The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible."

"There can be no high civility without a deep morality."

"The years teach me much which the days never know."

"There is always safety in valor."

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."

"They can conquer who believe they can."

"To be simple is to be great. Only little men pretend; big men are genuine and sincere."

"Three things are known only in three places: Valour, which knows itself only in war; Wisdom, only in anger; and Friendship, only in need."

"Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer."

"Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment."