Great Throughts Treasury

"Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death."

"That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm."

"It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility."

"If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings."

"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"

"It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action."

"She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss."

"And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multi-tude.. ... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart..... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!...Indeed, we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. "

"Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release."

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."

"To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist."

"When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities, it seems hardly worth while to be sad, but rather to laugh as gaily as we may, and ask little reason wherefore."

"In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it."

"One token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another."

"The weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime, are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish, in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity."

"The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him."

"My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream."

"It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times—to Death, if we give the matter the right word! ... We read in Dead Men’s books! We laugh at Dead Men’s jokes, and cry at Dead Men’s pathos! . . . Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man’s icy hand obstructs us!"

"A man will commit almost any wrong—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an Evil Destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there!"

"She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom."

"Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty."

"The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones, — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss."

"As I hurried onward, my fancy was busy with a comparison between the present aspect of the street and that which it probably wore when the British governors inhabited the mansion whither I was now going. Brick edifices in those times were few, till a succession of destructive fires had swept and swept again, the wooden dwellings and ware?houses from the most populous quarters of the town. The buildings stood insulated and inde?pendent, not, as now, merging their separate existences into connected ranges, with a front of tiresome identity, -- but each possessing features of its own, as if the owner's individual taste had shaped it, -- and the whole presenting a pictur?esque irregularity, the absence of which is hardly compensated by any beauties of our modern architecture."

"A bodily disease may be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual past."

"A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!."

"A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere."

"A man - poet, prophet, or whatever he may be - readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered."

"A few words, perhaps might satisfy the feverish yearning of my soul for some master-thought, that should guide me through this labyrinth of life, teaching wherefore I was born, and how to do my task on earth, and what is death. Alas! Even that unreal image should forget to ape me, and laugh at these vain questions. Thus do mortals deify, as it were, a mere shadow of themselves, a spectre of human reason, and ask of that to unveil the mysteries, which Divine Intelligence has revealed so far as needful to our guidance, and hid the rest."

"A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House."

"A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world."

"A grave and dark-clad company, quoth Goodman Brown."

"A good man's prayers are golden recompense! rejoined old Roger Chillingworth, as he took his leave. Yea, they are the current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mintmark on them!."

"A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul."

"A forced smile is uglier than a frown."

"A long time ago, in a town with which I used to be familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect, known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe, whose household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an old maid of all work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and wonderfully sluttish in attire."

"A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married state."

"A man--poet, prophet, or whatever be may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered."

"A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes."

"A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician."

"A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her."

"A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and other bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes."

"A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress."

"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it."

"A strange fatality seems to compel every human being to be around, like a ghost, in the places where some serious incident has left a deep furrow in his life, and MISUSE fatality is all the more inexorable, as the groove is of sadness and pain."

"A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere."

"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl."

"Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or in age, it has out-lived its privilege of spring time and sprightliness."

"All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent."

"Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart."

"All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic."