Great Throughts Treasury

"Abstinence is whereby a man refraineth from anything which he may lawfully claim."

"Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life."

"Adventure is not outside man; it is within."

"After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope."

"After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think."

"After all, the true seeing is within."

"Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babies; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep."

"Ah, said Dolly, with soothing gravity, it's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest — one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all — the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n — they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you, though there's folks as thinks different."

"All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children — in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world — those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things — men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy."

"All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet."

"All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other."

"All these crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner companion, or to see your favourite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities."

"All things except reason and order are possible with a mob."

"All things journey: sun and moon, morning, noon, and afternoon, night and all her stars; 'twixt the east and western bars round they journey, come and go! We go with them!"

"All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony."

"Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous."

"Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide."

"Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy."

"An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down."

"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."

"An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth."

"And Casaubon had done a wrong to Dorothea in marrying her. A man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship. 'It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices,' said Will; and he painted to himself what were Dorothea's inward sorrows as if he had been writing a choric wail."

"And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."

"And Dorothea... she had no dreams of being praised above other women."

"And every man and woman mentioned in this history was still living, except those whose end we know."

"And its deft magic ends what we begin.) Nay, in his dreams his hammer he would wield and seem to see a myriad types revealed, then spring with wondering triumphant cry, and, lest the inspiring vision should go by, would rush to labor with that plastic zeal which all the passion of our life can steal for force to work with. Each day saw the birth of various forms, which, flung upon the earth, seemed harmless toys to cheat the exacting hour, but were as seeds instinct with hidden power."

"And rank for her meant duty, various, yet equal in its worth, done worthily. Command was service; humblest service done by willing and discerning souls was glory."

"And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid."

"And we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony."

"And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment."

"And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better."

"Anger seek it prey,-- something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, like not to go off hungry, leaving Love to feast on milk and honeycomb at will."

"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."

"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."

"Are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life--a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?"

"As for farming, it's putting money into your pocket wi' your right hand and fetching it out wi' your left. As fur as I can see, it's raising victual for other folks, and just getting a mouthful for yourself and your children as you go along.... It's more than flesh and blood 'ull bear sometimes, to be toiling and striving, and up early and down late, and hardly sleeping a wink when you lie down for thinking as the cheese may swell, or the cows may slip their calf, or the wheat may grow green again i' the sheaf--and after all, at th' end o' the year, it's like as if you'd been cooking a feast and had got the smell of it for your pains."

"As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given us to guide our own steps; as the foot-soldier, who hears nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle he is in; hears plainly enough the word of command which he must himself obey."

"As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it."

"At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead."

"Attempts at description are stupid. Who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances."

"Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own."

"Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries."

"Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade."

"Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefullness. If you think of yourself only. you cannot develop because you are choking thee source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others."

"Beauteous Night lay dead under the pall of twilight, and the love-star sickened and shrank."

"Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for the strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day."

"Before marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were hers."

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."

"Best friend, my wellspring in the wilderness!"

"Better a false belief than no belief at all."