Great Throughts Treasury

"Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees."

"Every person is a book, each year a chapter."

"Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."

"Everybody lies... every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception."

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

"Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right."

"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."

"Everyone knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere."

"Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."

"Everything has its limit--iron ore cannot be educated into gold."

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: GRETCHEN: Wilhelm, where is the turnip? WILHELM: She has gone to the kitchen. GRETCHEN: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? WILHELM: It has gone to the opera."

"Everything in moderation except whiskey, and sometimes too much whiskey is just enough."

"Evidence... proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places, and it does not cure it or even diminish it."

"Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave."

"Except for my daughters, I have not grieved for any death as I have grieved for his. His was a great and beautiful spirit, he was a man ? all man, from his crown to his footsoles. My reverence for him was deep and genuine. [On the death of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll]"

"Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes."

"Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new."

"Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution."

"Explore. Dream. Discover."

"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable."

"Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; the only certainty is oblivion."

"Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense."

"Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it."

"Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean."

"Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it."

"Figures don't lie, but liars figure."

"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

"First get the facts, you can distort them later"

"Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can."

"Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself."

"For a male person bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes."

"For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity."

"For every grain of sand in our world, there are one million stars in the universe."

"For in a republic, who is the Country? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant ? merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is the country? Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn?t."

"For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it."

"Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go. That man's career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper's grave. For instance: if at any time--say in boyhood--Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billions of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America."

"Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy."

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that a violet sprays on the heel that has crushed it."

"Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane?but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you are a lunatic."

"Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time - except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a tradition... that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition, - and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets."

"Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her."

"France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country."

"France has usually been governed by prostitutes."

"France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France."

"Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it."

"Familiarity breeds contempt - and children."

"First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a dancing-school; but they didn't know no more how to dance than a kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in and pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution; but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and give them a solid good cussing, and made them skip out."

"Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."