Great Throughts Treasury

"Godliness is practical religion."

"Occupied people are not unhappy people."

"Our hearts must not only be broken with sorrow, but be broken from sin, to constitute repentance."

"There is nothing to do with men but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness."

"How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding would be untied by one word spoken in simple and confiding truth of heart! How many a solitary place would be made glad if love were there, and how many a dark dwelling would be filled with light!"

"The love of truth is the stimulus to all noble conversation. This is the root of all the charities. The true which springs from it may have a thousand branches, but they will all bear a golden and generous fruitage."

"We never seem to know what anything means till we have lost it. The full significance of those words, property, ease, health - the wealth of meaning that lies in the fond epithets, parent, child friend, we never know till they are taken away; till in place of the bright, visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow where nothing is - where we stretch our hands in vain, ands strain our eyes upon dark and dismal vacuity."

"The dead carry our thoughts to another and a nobler existence. They teach us, and especially buy all the strange and seemingly untoward circumstances of their departure from this life, that they and we shall live in a future state forever."

"Argument does not soften, but rather hardens, the obdurate heart."

"Every relation to mankind, of hate or scorn or neglect, is full of vexation and torment."

"Men cannot labor on always. They must have intervals of relaxation. They cannot sleep through these intervals. What are they to do? Why, if they do not work or sleep, they must have recreation. And if they have not recreation from healthful sources, they will be very likely to take it from the poisoned fountains of intemperance. Or, if they have pleasures, which, though innocent, are forbidden by the maxims of public morality, their very pleasures are liable to become poisoned fountains."

"The less we parade our misfortunes the more sympathy we command."

"The love of truth is the stimulus to all noble conversation. This is the root of all the charities. The tree which springs from it may have a thousand branches, but they will all bear a golden and generous fruitage."

"Truth is the root of all the charities."

"We may neglect the wrongs which we receive, but be careful to rectify those which we are the cause of to others."

"Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.""

"I don't believe in the goodness of disagreeable people."

"God giveth true grace to but a chosen few, however many aspire to it."