Great Throughts Treasury

"To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious."

"To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it."

"We are not won by arguments that we can analyze but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself."

"All animals except man know that the ultimate of life is to enjoy it."

"All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it--and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow."

"All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income."

"Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself."

"Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other?"

"It is the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that danger lies."

"Logic is like the sword those who appeal to it shall perish by it."

"People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced."

"That great Law of Nature, Self-Preservation."

"The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth, nor is it nothing but the truth."

"The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything."

"A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."

"A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it."

"A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget."

"A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind."

"A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted."

"A hen is only a egg's way of making another egg."

"A lawyer's dream of heaven - every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers."

"A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and Eve. "Which is Adam and which is Eve?" said one. "I do not know," said the other, "but I could tell if they had their clothes on.""

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing."

"A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration."

"A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second, hand."

"A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends."

"A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible."

"A News-monger is a Retailer of Rumour, that takes up upon Trust, and sells as cheap as he buys. He deals in a perishable Commodity, that will not keep: for if it be not fresh it lies upon his Hands, and will yield nothing. True or false is all one to him; for Novelty being the Grace of bothe, a Truth grows stale as soon as a Lye."

"A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them."

"A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct."

"A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing."

"A skillful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war."

"A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy."

"Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them."

"Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime."

"After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate."

"All a rhetorician's rules teach nothing but to name his tools."

"All eating is a kind of proselytising - a kind of dogmatising - a maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the eatee's."

"All love at first, like generous wine, Ferments and frets until 'tis fine; But when 'tis settled on the lee, And from th' impurer matter free, Becomes the richer still the older, And proves the pleasanter the colder."

"All men can do great things, if they know what great things are."

"All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others."

"All things are like exposed photographic plates that have no visible image on them till they have been developed."

"All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of criticizing with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely to give us, pleasure or no."

"All truth is not to be told at all times."

"All we know is, that even the humblest dead may live along after all trace of the body has disappeared; we see them doing it in the bodies and memories of these that come after them; and not a few live so much longer and more effectually than is desirable, that it has been necessary to get rid of them by Act of Parliament. It is love that alone gives life, and the truest life is that which we live not in ourselves but vicariously in others, and with which we have no concern. Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of the number of them that enter into life — although we know it not."

"Always eat grapes downwards — that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last."

"An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books."

"An art can only be learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread by it."

"An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing."

"An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed."