Great Throughts Treasury

"Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence or learning."

"The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder."

"Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still. "

"Every moment of resistance to temptation is a victory. "

"There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God."

"The habit of judging is so nearly incurable, and its cure is such an almost interminable process, that we must concentrate ourselves for a long while on keeping it in check, and this check is to be found in kind interpretations. We must come to esteem very lightly our sharp eye for evil, on which perhaps we once prided ourselves as cleverness. We must look at our talent for analysis of character as a dreadful possibility of huge uncharitableness. We are sure to continue to say clever things, so long as we continue to indulge in this analysis; and clever things are equally sure to be sharp and acid. We must grow to something higher, and something truer, than a quickness in detecting evil. "

"A life regardful of duty is crowned with an object, directed by a purpose, inspired by an enthusiasm, till the very humblest routine, carried out conscientiously for the sake of God is elevated into moral grandeur; and the very obscurest office, filled conscientiously at the bidding of God, becomes an imperial stage on which all the virtues play. To one who lies thus the insignificant becomes important, the unpleasant delightful, the evanescent eternal."

"The surest method of arriving at a knowledge of God's eternal purposes about us is to be found in the right use of the present moment. God's will does not come to us in the whole, but in fragments, and generally in small fragments. It is our business to piece it together, and to live it into one orderly vocation. "

"A man is always capable of a sin which he thinks another is capable of, or which he himself is capable of imputing to another."

"Creation is simply an act of divine love and cannot be accounted for on any other supposition than that of immense and eternal love."

"Anger would break the whole world to pieces if it could."

"Holiness is an unselfing of ourselves."

"Kind words are the music of the world. They have power which seems to be beyond natural causes, as if they were some angel's song which had lost its way and come on earth."

"Many a friendship, long, loyal, and self-sacrificing, rested at first on no thicker a foundation than a kind word. "

"There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and of leaving it behind them when they go. "

"Exactness in little duties (things) is a wonderful source of cheerfulness. "

"There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character. "

"When men do anything for God, the very least thing, they never know where it will end, nor what amount of work it will do for Him. Love's secret, therefore, is to be always doing things for God, and not to mind because they are such very little ones. "

"There is one wish ruling over all mankind, and it is a wish which is never in any single instance granted - each man wishes to be his own master. It is a boy's beautific vision, and it remains the grown-up man's ruling passion to the last. But the fact is, life is a service; the only question is, whom will we serve?"