Great Throughts Treasury

"The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys."

"The Lord Justice-Clerk was a stranger in that part of the country; but his lady wife was known there from a child, as her race had been before her."

"The man's tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another fever. Ah, there, said Morgan, that comed of sp'iling Bibles. That comed--as you call it--of being arrant asses."

"The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect."

"The most influential books and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. - They repeat, rearrange, and clarify the lessons of life, disengage us from ourselves, constrain us to the acquaintance of others, and show us the web of experience, but with a single change. - That monstrous, consuming ego of ours struck out."

"The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine."

"The narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers."

"The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realizm were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realizm, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action."

"The pleasant Land of Counterpane."

"The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty."

"The problem of education is two-fold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks."

"The rain is falling all around, it falls on field and tree, it rains on the umbrellas here, and on the ships at sea."

"The sea! cried the miller. Lord help us all, it is the greatest thing God made!"

"The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery."

"The sticks break, the stones crumble."

"The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life."

"The true success is to labor."

"The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor."

"The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy."

"The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

"The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole."

"The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all."

"The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature."

"The workpeople, to be sure, were most annoyingly slow, but time cured that."

"The world has no room for cowards."

"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

"The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design."

"The young demand joy like a right - the old only wish to be spared unbearable pain."

"Them that die will be the lucky ones!"

"Thems that die'll be the lucky ones."

"Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to saving our lives."

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."

"There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people."

"There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulation; their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape."

"There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul."

"There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else."

"There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."

"There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others."

"There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill."

"There is a strong feeling in favor of cowardly and prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardor and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man."

"There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may."

"There is but one art, to omit."

"There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life."

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."

"There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."

"There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear."

"There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change."

"There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last."

"There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us."

"There was a man in the island of Hawaii, whom I shall call Keawe; for the truth is, he still lives, and his name must be kept secret; but the place of his birth was not far from Honaunau, where the bones of Keawe the Great lie hidden in a cave."