Great Throughts Treasury

"For the blue sky bends over all!"

"For she belike hath drunken deep of all the blessedness of sleep."

"Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place (portentous-sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing an obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringŠd lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, "Where is it?""

"Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one."

"Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph."

"Found death in life, may here find life in death."

"From long to long in solemn sort."

"From his brimstone bed at break of day a walking the Devil is gone, to visit his snug little farm the earth, and see how his stock goes on."

"From the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae."

"Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood."

"General principles ... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves."

"From my early reading of Faery Tales, and Genii ? my mind had been habituated to the Vast ? and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight ? even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, and Relations of Giants and Magicians, and Genii? ? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. ? I know no other way of giving the mind a love of "the Great," and "the Whole." ? Those who have been led by the same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess ? They contemplate nothing but parts ? and are parts are necessarily little ? and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method; ? but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favor? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied that any thing could be seen, and uniformly put the negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination judgment, and the never being moved to rapture philosophy."

"Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power."

"God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table; and hourly some poor starving wretch comes to my door, to put in his claim for a part of it."

"God is everywhere! The God who framed Mankind to be one, mighty family, Himself our Father, and the world our home."

"God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus!? Why look's thou so?'?With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross."

"Good and bad men are each less so than they seem."

"Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold."

"Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn."

"God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, you piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!"

"Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, the good great man? Three treasures,-love and light, and calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath;"

"Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so."

"Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light."

"Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star in his steep course? So long he seems to pause on thy bald awful head, ? sovran Blanc!"

"Hanging so light, and hanging so high."

"He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope."

"He holds him with his glittering eye-- . . . . And listens like a three years' child."

"Hath a toothless mastiff bitch."

"He prayeth well, who loveth well both man and bird and beast."

"He has no native Passion, because he is not a Thinker ? and has probably weakened his Intellect by the haunting Fear of becoming extravagant."

"He saw a cottage with a double coach-house, a cottage of gentility! And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility."

"He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them."

"He that begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard, by his own stable and the devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother, Abel."

"He saw a lawyer killing a viper."

"He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal."

"He went like one that hath been stunn'd, and is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn."

"Health is a great blessing ? competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing ? and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but, that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian."

"He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity's eye with her own frozen tear."

"He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration."

"Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold."

"Her face, oh call it fair, not pale!"

"Her gentle limbs did she undress."

"Her gentle limbs did she undress, and lay down in her loveliness."

"Here were forests ancient as the hills."

"His good sword rust."

"His soul is with the saints, I trust."

"Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains!"

"Hope without an object cannot live."