Great Throughts Treasury

"To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all."

"To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty."

"To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead."

"To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him."

"To love God is to have good health, good looks, good sense, experience, a kindly nature and a fair balance of cash in hand."

"To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not."

"To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it someday, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself."

"To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it."

"To swallow gudgeons ere they 're catch'd, And count their chickens ere they 're hatch'd."

"To try to live in posterity is to be like an actor who leaps over the footlights and talks to the orchestra."

"True as the dial to the sun, Although it be not shin'd upon."

"Truth consists not in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so."

"Truth is generally kindness, but where the two diverge and collide, kindness should override truth."

"Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed."

"Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know."

"Very useless things we neglect, till they become old and useless enough to be put in Museums: and so very important things we study till, when they become important enough, we ignore them -- and rightly."

"Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing."

"We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them."

"We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them."

"We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers."

"We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble--no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape."

"We can no longer separate things as we once could: everything tends towards unity; one thing, one action, in one place, at one time. On the other hand, we can no longer unify things as we once could; we are driven to ultimate atoms, each one of which is an individuality. So that we have an infinite multitude of things doing an infinite multitude of actions in infinite time and space; and yet they are not many things, but one thing."

"We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket."

"We do not know what death is. If we know so little about life which we have experienced, how shall be know about death which we have not - and in the nature of things never can?"

"We grant, although he had much wit, He was very shy of using it."

"We grow weary of those things (and perhaps soonest) which we most desire."

"We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us."

"We meet people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits."

"We must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough"

"We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting one, often getting just the wrong one."

"We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms."

"We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals."

"What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth."

"What makes all doctrines plain and clear- About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was prov'd true before Prove false again Two hundred more."

"What runs through a person like water through a sieve."

"Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For every why he had a wherefore."

"Whatso'er we perpetrate We do but row, we are steered by fate."

"When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence."

"When I am dead I would rather people thought me better than I was instead of worse; but if they think me worse, I cannot help it and, if it matters at all, it will matter more to them than to me."

"When pious frauds and holy shifts Are dispensations and gifts."

"When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness."

"When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented."

"When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!"

"When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once."

"Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter. If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand so great a drain even on so great a reserve?"

"Where entity and quiddity, the ghosts of defunct bodies, fly."

"While the honour thou hast got Is spick and span new."

"With crosses, relics, crucifixes, beads, pictures, rosaries, and pixes, The tools of working out salvation By mere mechanic operation."

"Who thought he 'd won The field as certain as a gun."

"With books and money plac'd for show Like nest-eggs to make clients lay, And for his false opinion pay."