Great Throughts Treasury

"He who fights and runs away may live to fight another day."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey where wealth accumulates and men decay."

"Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves."

"A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future."

"Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse."

"I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing."

"The more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader."

"A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity."

"Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones."

"The nakedness of the indignant world may be cloathed from the trimmings of the vain."

"All that a husband or wife really wants is to be pitied a little, praised a little, and appreciated a little."

"A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond."

"As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease."

"As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood."

"Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same."

"Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter."

"Fortune is ever seen accompanying industry."

"Those who place their affections at first on trifles for amusement, will find these become at last their most serious concerns."

"Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook."

"Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations."

"In arguing one should meet serious pleading with humor, and humor with serious pleading."

"The virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarcely worth the sentinel."

"The first blow is half the battle."

"Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other."

"The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy."

"Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others."

"The volume of Nature is the book of knowledge."

"Crime generally punishes itself."

"Those that think must govern those that toil."

"A kind and gentle heart he had, To comfort friends and foes; The naked every day he clad When he put on his clothes."

"Ridicule has always been the enemy of enthusiasm, and the only worthy opponent to ridicule is success."

"To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured; to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service."

"Unequal combinations are always disadvantageous to the weaker side."

"When any one of our relations was found to be a person of a very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house I ever took care to lend him a riding-coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes a horse of small value, and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them."

"People seek within a short span of life to satisfy a thousand desires, each of which is insatiable."

"Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes."

"A modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation."

"A night-cap deck'd his brows instead of bay, A cap by night,--a stocking all the day."

"A poor man resembles a fiddler, whose music, though liked, is not much praised, because he lives by it; while a gentleman performer, though the most wretched scraper alive, throws the audience into rapture."

"A reserved lover, it is said, always makes a suspicious husband."

"A traveler of taste will notice that the wise are polite all over the world, but the fool only at home."

"A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a squabby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty."

"A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are."

"A map does not exhibit a more distinct view of the situation and boundaries of every country, than its news does a picture of the genius and morals of its inhabitants."

"A mind too vigorous and active, serves only to consume the body to which it is joined, as the richest jewels are soonest found to wear their settings."

"A youth who has thus spent his life among books, new to the world, and unacquainted with man but by philosophic information, may be considered as a being whose mind is filled with the vulgar errors of the wise: utterly unqualified for a journey through life, yet confident of his own skill in the direction, he sets out with confidence, blunders on with vanity, and finds himself at last undone."

"Above all things never let your son touch a novel of romance. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss! They teach the youthful to sigh after beauty and happiness that never existed; to despise the little good that fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more than she ever gave; and in general - take the word of a man who has seen the world, and studied it more by experience than by precept - take my word for it, I say, that such books teach us very little of the world."

"Absence, like death, sets a seal on the image of those we love: we cannot realize the intervening changes which time may have effected."

"Age, that lessens the enjoyment of life, increases our desire of living. Those dangers which, in the vigor of youth, we had learned to despise, assume new terrors as we grow old. Our caution increasing as our years increase, fear becomes at last the prevailing passion of the mind, and the small remainder of life is taken up in useless efforts to keep off our end, or provide for a continued existence?. Whence, then, is this increased love of life, which grows upon us with our years? Whence comes it that we thus make greater efforts to preserve our existence at a period when it becomes scarce worth the keeping? Is it that nature, attentive to the preservation of mankind, increases our wishes to live, while she lessens our enjoyments; and, as she robs the senses of every pleasure, equips imagination in the spoil? Life would be insupportable to an old man who, loaded with infirmities, feared death no more than when in the vigor of manhood: the numberless calamities of decaying nature, and the consciousness of surviving every pleasure, would at once induce him with his own hand to terminate the scene of misery: but happily the contempt of death forsakes him at a time when it could only be prejudicial, and life acquires an imaginary value in proportion as its real value is no more."

"Alike all ages: dames of ancient days Have led their children through the mirthful maze, And the gay grandsire, skill'd in gestic lore, Has frisk'd beneath the burden of threescore."