Great Throughts Treasury

"One can be instructed in society; one is inspired only in solitude."

"One is led astray alike by sympathy and coldness, by praise and by blame."

"One man's word; we should quietly hear both sides."

"Only the heart without a stain knows perfect ease."

"Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach use? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation."

"Passions are defects or virtues in the highest power."

"Plunge boldly into the thick of life! each lives it, not to many is it known; and seize it where you will it is interesting."

"Self-love exaggerates our faults as well as our virtues."

"Sin writes history; goodness is silent."

"Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing."

"Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world."

"The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue."

"The childhood of immortality."

"The deed is everything, the glory naught."

"The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it."

"The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world."

"There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time."

"There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows."

"There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational."

"There is not a single outward mark of courtesy that does not have a deep moral basis."

"There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it."

"Time is short and art is long."

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."

"True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility, poverty, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine."

"Truth is a torch, but a terrific one; therefore we all try to grasp it with closed eyes, fearing to be blinded...Wisdom is found only in truth."

"We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies."

"We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves."

"We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens."

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

"We are surrounded by abysses, but the greatest of all depths is in our own heart, and an irresistible leaning leads us there. Draw thyself from thyself!"

"We do not learn to know men through their coming to us. To find out what sort of persons they are, we must go to them."

"We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding."

"What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable."

"What is not fully understood is not possessed."

"What is the true test of character, unless it be its progressive development in the bustle and turmoil, in the action and reaction of daily life?"

"What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own."

"What sort of God would it be who only pushed from without?"

"Where do we now meet an original nature? And where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?"

"Wisdom is only found in truth."

"You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer."

"A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others."

"A good man, through obscurest aspirations, has still an instinct of the one true way."

"A great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice."

"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul."

"A man who does not know foreign languages is ignorant of his own."

"A man’s errors are what make him amiable."

"A man’s name is not like a mantle, which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which like the skin has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself."

"Age makes us not childish, as some say; it finds us still true children."

"All men who would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself."

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."