Great Throughts Treasury

"Nature is but the echo of the soul, and images nothing therefore of the Divine creation and providence which is not primarily impressed by the soul."

"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain."

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

"A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him."

"A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result."

"Acceptance of what happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune."

"A thing is important if anyone think it important."

"Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action."

"All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods."

"All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish."

"Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another."

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

"All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience."

"An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible."

"An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation."

"An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter."

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."

"As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings."

"Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought."

"Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."

"Begin to be now what you will be hereafter."

"Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me."

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."

"Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

"Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy brings pain."

"Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not."

"Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by imitating others."

"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an un-subdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."

"Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose."

"Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an un-habitual way."

"Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you."

"First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it."

"Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor."

"History is a bath of blood."

"He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed."

"Human beings, by changing the inner attitude of their minds, can change the outer aspect of their lives."

"How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure."

"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride."

"I will act as if what I do makes a difference."

"If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick."

"I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences."

"I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing."

"I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave."

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight."

"If things are ever to move upward, someone must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed."

"If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience."

"If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged."

"If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more."