Great Throughts Treasury

"Connect. Embrace. Liberate. Love somebody. Just one person. And then spread that to two. And as many as you can. You'll see the difference it makes."

"Companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and habilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents in my life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fullness and variety than during my continuance in office."

"Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms -- a pistol -- perhaps a revolver."

"Could the departed, whoever he may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find himself at a higher or a tower point than he had formerly occupied on the scale of public appreciation."

"Daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency."

"Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town."

"Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided."

"Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal."

"Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind."

"Death should take me while I am in the mood."

"Do anything, save to lie down and die!"

"Devote today to something so daring even you can't believe you're doing it."

"Declare today sacred time. ? off-limits to everyone, unless invited by you. Take care of your personal wants and needs. Say no, graciously but firmly, to others - demands."

"Dogs are my favorite role models. I want to work like a dog, doing what I was born to do with joy and purpose. I want to play like a dog, with total, jolly abandon. I want to love like a dog, with unabashed devotion and complete lack of concern about what people do for a living, how much money they have, or how much they weigh. The fact that we still live with dogs, even when we don't have to herd or hunt our dinner, gives me hope for humans and canines alike."

"Does thou know mw so little Hester Pyrnne? Are my purposes wont to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could i do better for my object than to let thee live-than to give the medicines against all harm and peril of life-so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?"

"Don't settle for a relationship that won't let you be yourself."

"Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's establishment) to take up her little ladyship and dress her."

"Don't back down just to keep the peace. Standing up for your beliefs builds self-confidence and self-esteem."

"Dr. Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak."

"Drink then, he replied, still with the same cold composure."

"Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together."

"Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream"

"During the progress of the story a storm had been gathering abroad and raging and rattling so loudly in the upper regions of the Province House, that it seemed as if all the old governors and great men were running riot above stairs while Mr. Bela Tiffany babbled of them below."

"Earth has one angel less, and heaven one more since yesterday. Already, kneeling at the throne, she has received her welcome, and is resting on the bosom of her Savior."

"Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror."

"Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing."

"Every new society is soon in need of a graveyard and a prison."

"Every day of my life makes me feel more and more how seldom a fact is accurately stated; how almost invariably when a story has passed through the mind of a third person it becomes, so far as regards the impression it makes in further repetitions, little better than a falsehood; and this, too, though the narrator be the most truth-seeking person in existence."

"Even the wildest dreams have to start somewhere. Allow yourself the time and space to let your mind wander and your imagination fly."

"Few of her sex, on such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling Hepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him, stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance had excited."

"Every crime destroys more Edens than our own."

"Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest and skill to follow it up."

"For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation. The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were the nearest representatives."

"Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow."

"For the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame."

"For when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones."

"For, has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity?"

"For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!"

"God, said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, God will give him blood to drink!"

"For, young or old, in play or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute."

"Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries."

"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."

"Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne."

"Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world."

"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over, said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, there was no place so secret- no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,- save on this very scaffold!"

"He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed."

"He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them..."

"Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon street; the house is the old Pyncheon-house; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon-Elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom fail to turn down Pyncheon-street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities--the great elm-tree, and the weather-beaten edifice."

"He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure."

"He had that sense, or inward prophecy -- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish -- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime."