Great Throughts Treasury

"Endurance is patience concentrated."

"Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise."

"Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man."

"Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?"

"Doubt of any kind cannot be resolved except by action."

"Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship."

"Earnestness alone makes life eternity."

"Custom doth make dotards of us all."

"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge."

"Alas! the fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself."

"Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it; and work at it like Hercules. One monster there is in the world, the idle man."

"A man without a purpose is soon down at zero. Better to have a bad purpose than no purpose at all."

"A man’s religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort for believing."

"A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility."

"A word spoken is season, at the right moment, is the matter of ages."

"All are born to observe laws; few are born to establish them."

"A star is beautiful; it affords pleasure, not from what it is to do, or to give, but simply by being what it is. It befits the heavens; it has congruity with the mighty space in which it dwells. It has repose; no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has freedom; no obstruction lies between it and infinity."

"A thought once awakened does not again slumber."

"All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble."

"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books."

"Biography is the only true history."

"Any road will lead you to the end of the World!"

"Books are a triviality. Life alone is great."

"All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled, spreads till all is luminous."

"Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows."

"Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee! Thy second duty will already have become clearer."

"Every noble work is at first impossible."

"Experience takes dreadfully high school wages, but he teaches like no other."

"Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a "taxing machine," to the contented a "machine for securing property.""

"He is of the earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims, - with immortal longings, with thoughts which sweep the heavens and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest."

"Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death."

"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."

"In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves."

"History is the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what can be called thought."

"He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that."

"In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance."

"In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it."

"In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that ever was or ever will be of godlike in this world, the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men."

"In idleness there is perpetual despair."

"Infinite is the help man can yield to man."

"It is not a lucky word, this name "impossible"; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths."

"Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own. A greater vividness and permanency of impression is secured, and facts thus acquired become registered in the mind in a way that mere imparted information can never produce."

"Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him."

"Man always worships something; always he sees the infinite shadowed forth in something finite."

"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to man."

"Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light."

"Man is, properly speaking based upon hope; he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope."

"Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance."

"Men’s hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against the evil thing only."

"Manners are stronger than laws."