Great Throughts Treasury

"Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable."

"Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say"

"Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age."

"Folks as have no mind to be o' use have allays the luck to be out o' the road when there's anything to be done."

"For character too is a process and an unfolding... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?"

"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly."

"For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."

"For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion."

"For strong souls live like fire-hearted suns; to spend their strength in furthest striving action."

"For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief."

"For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs."

"For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it."

"For 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."

"For thoughts are so great--aren't they, sir? They seem to lie upon us like a deep flood; and it's my besetment to forget where I am and everything about me, and lose myself in thoughts that I could give no account of, for I could neither make a beginning nor ending of them in words."

"For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."

"For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life."

"Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill."

"Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like feeling obligated to look serious, and he centers his doubts on what people expect of a clergyman."

"Friend more divine than all divinities."

"Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words."

"Friendship is the joy, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out as they are, chaff and grain together, confident that a faithful, friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away."

"Friendships begin with liking or gratitude - roots that can be pulled up."

"Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters."

"Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline."

"Good luck a god count all unlucky men."

"Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker."

"Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, and serve the ends of wisdom."

"Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion."

"Great Love has many attributes, and shrines for varied worshippers, but his force divine shows most its many-named fullness in the man whose nature multitudinously mixed-- each ardent impulse grappling with a thought-- resists all easy gladness, all content save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul flooded with consciousness of good that is finds life one bounteous answer."

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

"Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas."

"Has anyone ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?"

"He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust."

"He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighborly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched — he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him."

"He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him."

"He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James."

"He loved also to think, I did it! And I believe the only people who are free from that weakness are those who have no work to call their own."

"He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains."

"He rushed before them to the glittering space, and, with a strength that was but strong desire, cried, "I am Jubal, I! .... I made the lyre!" The tones amid a lake of silence fell broken and strained, as if a feeble bell had tuneless pealed the triumph of a land to listening crowds in expectation spanned. Sudden came showers of laughter on that lake; they spread along the train from front to wake in one great storm of merriment, while he shrank doubting whether he could Jubal be."

"He said within his soul, "'this is the end: o'er all the earth to where the-heavens bend and hem men's travel, i have breathed my soul: I lie here now the remnant of that whole, the embers of a life, a lonely pain; as far-off rivers to my thirst were vain, so of my mighty years nought comes to me again"."

"He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age."

"He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, not its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves."

"He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confident or distrustful."

"He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid."

"He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong."

"He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."

"He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric."

"He was unique to her among men because he’s impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who’s nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man."

"Hell is oneself; Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone."

"Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side."