Great Throughts Treasury

"A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it."

"A man in old age is like a sword in the shop window. Men that look upon the perfect blade do not imagine the process by which it was completed. Man is a sword; daily life is the workshop; and God the artificer; and those cares which beats upon the anvil, and file the edge, and eat in, acid-like, the inscription on the hilt - those are the very things that fashion the man."

"A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like a summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the joyous day of the whole week."

"A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air."

"Affliction comes to us all not to make us sad, but sober, not to make us sorry, but wise; not to make us despondent, but by its darkness to refresh us, as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish, but to enrich us, as the plough enriches the field; to multiply our joy, as the seed by planting, is multiplied a thousand-fold."

"A man may be outwardly successful all his life long, and die hollow and worthless as a puff-ball; and he may be externally defeated all his life long, and die in the royalty of a kingdom established within him. A man's true estate of power and riches, is to be in himself; not in his dwelling, or position, or external relations, but in his own essential character. That is the realm on which he is to live, if he is to live as a good man."

"A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind."

"All words are pegs to hangs ideas on."

"Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; to the one it is exceedingly long, to the other exceedingly short."

"Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches in the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skillfully constructed, could do; nay, which brings to view even the throne of God, and pierces that nebulous distance where are those eternal verities in which true life consists."

"Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could."

"Communicate downwards to subordinates with at least the same care and attention as you communicate upward to superiors"

"Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may swell."

"Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven."

"Do not be afraid because the community teems with excitement. Silence and death are dreadful. The rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, the conflict of realities, invigorate, cleanse, and establish the truth."

"Education is the knowledge of how to use the whole of oneself. Many men use but one or two faculties out of the score with which they are endowed. A man is educated who knows how to make a tool of every faculty - how to open it, how to keep it sharp, and how to apply it to all practical purposes."

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. We should live for the future, and yet should find our life in the fidelities of the present; the last is only the method of the first."

"Every man should use his intellect, not as he uses his lamp in the study, only for his own seeing, but as the lighthouse uses its lamp, that those afar off on the sea may see the shining, and learn their way."

"Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality"

"God planted fear in the soul as truly as He planted hope or courage. Fear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul’s signal for rallying."

"God sends experience to paint men’s portraits."

"God washes the eyes by tears until they can behold the invisible land where tears shall come no more. O love! O affliction! ye are the guides that show us the way through the great airy space where our loved ones walked; and, as hounds easily follow the scent before the dew be risen, so God teaches us, while yet our sorrow is wet, to follow on and find our dear ones in heaven."

"Every green thing loves to die in bright colors."

"Faith is nothing but spiritualized imagination."

"God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how."

"Experience is the mother of custom."

"God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam, or a balloon without gas."

"God planted fear in the soul as truly as he planted hope and courage. It is a kind of bell or gong which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance on the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying."

"God pardons like a mother who kisses the offence into everlasting forgetfulness."

"Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it."

"I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything."

"Good-humor makes all things tolerable."

"Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health."

"Happiness is not the end of life; character is."

"I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love."

"If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl’s weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God’s noblest work; a woman made out of a man is His meanest."

"I think half the troubles for which men go slouching in prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. Man of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses."

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you."

"If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wrong, but the coals are."

"If God but cares for our inward and eternal life, if by all the experiences of this life He is reducing it and preparing for its disclosure, nothing can befall us but prosperity. Every sorrow shall be but the setting of some luminous jewel of joy. Our very morning shall be but the enamel around the diamond; our very hardships but the metallic rim that holds the opal, glancing with strange interior fires."

"If you are idle you are on the way to ruin, and there are few stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road."

"If one should give me a dish of sand, and tell me there were particles of iron in it, I might look for them with my eyes, and search for them with my clumsy fingers, and be unable to detect them; but let me take a magnet and sweep through it, and how would it draw to itself the almost invisible particles by the mere power of attraction. The unthankful heart, like my finger in the sand, discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day, and as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings, only the iron in God's sand is gold!"

"In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot."

"If you attempt to beat a man down and so get his goods lower than a fair price, you are attempting to commit burglary as much as though you broke into his shop to take the things without paying for them. There is cheating on both sides of the counter, and generally less behind it than before."

"It is a bitter thought to an avaricious spirit that by and by all these accumulations must be left behind. Wee can only carry away from this world the flavor of our good or evil deeds."

"Ignorance is the womb of monsters."

"In things pertaining to enthusiasm no man is sane who does know how to be insane on proper occasions."

"It is defeat that turns bone to flint, and gristle to muscle, and makes men invincible, and formed those heroic natures that are now in ascendancy in the world. Do not then be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause."

"It is not the going out of port, but the coming in that determines the success of a voyage."

"It is not what a man gets, but what a man is that he should think of. He should first think of his character and then of his condition. He that has character need have no fears about his condition. Character will draw after it condition. Circumstances obey principles."