Great Throughts Treasury

"With many a stiff thwack, many a bang, Hard crab-tree and old iron rang."

"With mortal crisis doth portend My days to appropinque an end."

"Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons."

"Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use."

"Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them."

"Words impede and either kill, or are killed by, perfect thought; but they are, as a scaffolding, useful, if not indispensable, for the building up of imperfect thought and helping to perfect it."

""Words, words, words," he writes, "are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. Words divide; thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear—only the clothes. I say this over and over again, for there is nothing of more importance. Other men's words will stop you at the beginning of an investigation. A man may play with words all his life, arranging them and rearranging them like dominoes. If I could think to you without words you would understand me better.""

"Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness."

"You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it."

"You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have half one and half the other - yet in practice this is exactly what you must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and the same time."

"Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."

"Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness."

"Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits."