Great Throughts Treasury

"Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do."

"Music is the fourth great material want of our natures - first food, then raiment, then shelter, then music."

"No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities."

"One who is contented with what he has done will never become famous for what he will do. He has lain down to die. The grass is already growing over him."

"One who is contented with what he has done will never become famous for what he will do. He has lain down to die, and the grass is already growing over him."

"Our first love and last love is - self-love."

"Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity."

"Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion."

"The busiest of living agents are certain dead men's thoughts; they are forever influencing the opinions and destinies of men."

"The cheerful live longest in years and afterwards in regards. Cheerfulness is the often offshoot of goodness."

"The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better."

"The great obstacle to progress is prejudice."

"The language of the heart which comes from the heart and goes to the heart - is always simple, graceful, and full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language, difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied."

"The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seen and to be seen."

"The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor; to sketch out a map of possibilities; and then to treat them as probabilities."

"The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament."

"The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it - to realize it to the full - to be a profound and inscrutable mystery."

"The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess."

"The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater, ennoble it."

"The use we make of our fortune determines as to its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly."

"There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable."

"There is no sense of weariness like that which closes a day of eager and unintermitted pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten and the core sticks in the throat. Expectation has given way to ennui, and appetite to satiety."

"‘Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now."

"To cultivate a garden is to walk with God."

"To cultivate the sense of the beautiful is but one, and the most effectual, of the ways of cultivating an appreciation of the Divine goodness."

"To quote copiously and well requires taste, judgment and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound."

"Tranquil pleasures last the longest."

"Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered."

"Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time."

"We give our best affections to the beautiful, only our second best to the useful."

"We may learn from children how large a part of our grievances is imaginary. But the pain is just as real."

"We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime."

"We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we must upon it."

"When all else is lost, the future still remains."

"Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words."

"Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a congenial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers."

"Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty."