Great Throughts Treasury

"Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will."

"Blameless people are always the most exasperating."

"Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination."

"Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are."

"Breed is stronger than pasture."

"But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent."

"But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand."

"But certain winds will make men's temper bad."

"But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly--something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates."

"But ere the laughter died from out the rear, anger in front saw profanation near; Jubal was but a name in each man's faith for glorious power untouched by that slow death which creeps with creeping time; this too, the spot, and this the day, it must be crime to blot, even with scoffing at a madman's lie: Jubal was not a name to wed with mockery. Two rushed upon him: two, the most devout in honor of great Jubal, thrust him out, and beat him with their flutes. 'Twas little need; he strove not, cried not, but with tottering speed, as if the scorn and howls were driving wind that urged his body, serving so the mind which could but shrink and yearn, he sought the screen of thorny thickets, and there fell unseen. The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky, while Jubal lonely laid him down to die."

"But faithfullness can feed on suffering,"

"But for tradition, we walk evermore to higher paths by brightening reason's lamp."

"But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors. We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs."

"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."

"But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me."

"But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history."

"But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still - very wonderful things have happened!"

"But is it what we love, or how we love, that makes true good?"

"But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong."

"But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves."

"But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with."

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: 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."

"But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man."

"But the vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him."

"But then the need of being loved, the strongest need... in poor Maggie’s nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it."

"But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls."

"But very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings."

"But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable."

"But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope."

"But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love."

"But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last."

"But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose to know the mind that stirs between the wings of bees."

"By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

"Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture."

"Can man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace, or their father and mother."

"Certain winds will make men's temper bad."

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

"Character is not cut in marble; it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do."

"'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'."

"Childhood has no forebodings; but then it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow."

"Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life."

"Coarse kindness is at least better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness."

"College mostly makes people like bladders--just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em."

"Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee."

"Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer’s day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles."

"Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves."

"Conscience is harder than our enemies, knows more, accuses with more nicety."

"Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course."

"Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?"

"Crowing thought makes growing revelation."