Great Throughts Treasury
This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Greenleaf Whittier
American Poet, Editor
"Beauty seen is never lost."
"For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: "It might have been.""
"Search thine own heart. What paineth thee in others in thyself may be."
"The simple heart that freely asks in love, obtains."
"The tissue of Life to be we weave with colors all our own, and in the field of Destiny we reap as we have sown."
"There's life alone in duty done, and rest alone in striving."
"When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead."
"Who never climbs rarely falls."
"Despair is infidelity and death."
"Simple duty hath no place for fear."
"The good is always beautiful, the beautiful is good."
"To worship rightly is to love each other, each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer."
"Truth should be the first lesson of the child and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature."
"Hatred of cant and doubt of human creeds may well be felt; the unpardonable sin is to deny the word of God from within."
"We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave of text and legend. Reason’s voice and God’s, Nature’s and Duty’s, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save justice and mercy and humility, a reasonable service of good deeds, pure living, tenderness to human needs, reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see the Master’s footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, but the calm beauty of an ordered life whose very breathing is unworded praise! A life that stands as all true lives have stood firm-rooted in the faith that God is good."
"need love’s tender lesson taught as only weakness can; God has His small interpreters; the child must teach the man."
"The rushing of the sea-tides of our soul; and inspirations, that we deem our own, are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing of things beyond our reason or control."