Great Throughts Treasury

"Service makes men competent."

"The highest qualities of character must be earned."

"Religion is the life of God in the soul of man."

"A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained."

"Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice."

"It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity."

"Religion is not a conclusion of the reason."

"Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry and sin not."

"A good book is a good friend. He will talk to you if you want him to talk. however would shut up if you do not want him to talk. A library is a collection of a good friend."

"I abhor a hoe. I am fond of flowers but not of dirt, and had rather buy them than cultivate them."

"Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry."

"Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern."

"The brotherhood of man is an integral part of Christianity no less than the Fatherhood of God; and to deny the one is no less infidel than to deny the other."

"The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced."

"The only tastes worth having are acquired tastes."

"The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest."

"I cannot harness a horse. I am afraid of a cow."

"In New York - whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame - not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements."

"Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past."

"Patience is passion tamed."

"We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its insurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer."