Great Throughts Treasury

"Dark the night, with breath all flowers, and tender broken voice that fills with ravishment the listening hours,-- whisperings, wooings, liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings in low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills! Dark the night yet is she bright, for in her dark she brings the mystic star, trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love, from some unknown afar."

"Dear, I trusted you as hold men trust God. You could no naught that was not pure and loving--though the deed might pierce me unto death."

"Death is th' king of this world: 'tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet."

"Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years."

"Debasing the moral currency"

"Decide what you think is right and stick to it."

"Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, and righteous or unrighteous, being done, must throb in after-throbs till Time itself be laid in stillness, and the universe quiver and breathe upon no mirror more."

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

"Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand."

"Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."

"Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?"

"Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?"

"Does anyone suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?"

"Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."

"Don't seem to be on the lookout for crows else you'll set other people watching."

"Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion for Adam in Paradise--there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief; though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity."

"Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?' said Lydgate, moving to Mr. Farebrother's side, and looking rather absently at the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed in exquisite writing. 'The shortest way is to make your value felt, so that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not.' 'With all my heart. But then you must be sure of having the value, and you must keep yourself independent. Very few men can do that. Either you slip out of service altogether, and become good for nothing, or you wear the harness and draw a good deal where your yoke-fellow pull you."

"Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool."

"Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said Exactly to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it."

"Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity."

"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."

"Each day he wrought and better than he planned, shape breeding shape beneath his restless hand. (The soul without still helps the soul within,"

"Each thought is a nail that is driven in structures that cannot decay; and the mansion at last will be given to us as we build it each day."

"Each position has its corresponding duties."

"Education was almost always a matter of luck usually ill luck in those distant days."

"Effective magic is transcendent nature."

"Eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all we've got to do is to trusten - Master Marner, to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know."

"Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos."

"Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means --one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies."

"Esther always avoided asking questions of Lydley, who found an answer as she found a key, by pouring out a pocketful of miscellanies."

"Even success needs its consolations."

"Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support."

"Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval."

"Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other."

"Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life."

"Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster."

"Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible."

"Everything is all one - that is the beginning and end with you."

"Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth."

"Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name. ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents."

"Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world."

"Excessive literary production is a social offense."

"Expenditure-like ugliness and errors-becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others."

"Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living."

"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."

"Fairy folk a-listening hear the seed sprout in the spring, and for music to their dance hear the hedgerows wake from trance, sap that trembles into buds sending little rhythmic floods of fairy sound in fairy ears. Thus all beauty that appears has birth as sound to finer sense and lighter-clad intelligence."

"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it."

"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement."

"Fate has carried me 'mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand--not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast to pierce another."

"Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities."