Great Throughts Treasury

"There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final."

"There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them."

"When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power."

"To be a Jew is to belong to an old harmless race that has lived in every country in the world; and that has enriched every country it has lived in. It is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, industrious against idleness, kind against cruelty! It is to belong to a race that has given Europe its religion; its moral law; and much of its science-perhaps even more of its genius-in art, literature and music. This is to be a Jew; and you know now what is required of you! You have no country but the world; and you inherit nothing but wisdom and brotherhood. "

"It is very a dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice."

"In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life /subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality /no human being's education can have a safe foundation."

"Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness."

"Truth, though it has many disadvantages, is at least changeless. You can always find it where you left it."

"A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is."

"Jane Everest glanced about her sitting-room to see if she hadn't an excuse for moving about in it. But it was relentlessly tidy. The file burned brightly, a tray with whisky-and-soda stood, equally ready, for triumph or defeat."

"Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it-and a greater fool if you count upon it."

"To be in the right is often an expensive business."

"No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance."

"Things that happen, however painful they are at the time, do not matter very much for long. Only how we behave to them matters."

"When Freya woke up, she felt as if she were recovering from a long and painful illness, out of the reach for the first time of all disagreeable sensations."

"Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within."

"To see a shadow and think it is a tree-that is a pity; but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal."

"We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them."

"When lightning strikes, the mouse is sometimes burned with the farm."