Great Throughts Treasury

"Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves."

"Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility an callousness that encroach by little and little of the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish."

"Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman’s heart has holier idols."

"Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love."

"More helpful than all wisdom or counsel is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."

"No man can be wise on an empty stomach."

"No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted."

"No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence."

"Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand."

"Nothing will give permanent success in any enterprise of life, except native capacity cultivated by honest and persevering effort. Genius is often but the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline."

"One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we put it ourselves."

"Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds."

"Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking."

"The contented man is never poor; the discontented never rich."

"The only true knowledge of our fellowman is that which enables us to feel with him - which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion."

"The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return."

"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."

"To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise."

"We part more easily with what we possess, than with the expectation of what we wish for: and the reason of it is, that what we expect is always greater than what we enjoy."

"Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?"

"What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other."

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting."

"All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation. "

"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love. "

"For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. "

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

"May every soul that touches mine - be it the slightest contact - get there from some good; some little grace; one kindly thought; one aspiration yet unfelt; one bit of courage for the darkening sky; one gleam of faith to brave the thickening ills of life; one glimpse of brighter skies beyond the gathering mists - to make this life worthwhile. "

"The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth. "

"There is no short cut, no patent tramroad to wisdom; after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time. "

"We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves. "

"When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity."

"My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy."

"I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven — the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it — it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition — make haste — oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations."

"Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness."

"The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."

" It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion."

"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat."

"The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men."

"Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state."

"Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves."

"Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity."

"There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope."

"It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium."

"What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"

"People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors."

"Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending."

"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."

"Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible—nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where by beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories."

"Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion."