Great Throughts Treasury

"Music is a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that."

"No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind."

"Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness."

"No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, their vivifying influence in man's life."

"Nothing ever happens but once in this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning."

"No violent extreme endures."

"Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever does or can die; but all is still here, and recognized or not, lives and works through endless changes."

"One of the Godlike things of this world is the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men."

"Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

"Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one."

"Over the time thou hast no power; to redeem a world sunk in dishonesty has not been given thee; solely over one man therein thou hast a quite absolute, uncontrollable power; him redeem, him make honest."

"Out of eternity this new day is born; into eternity at night will return."

"Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world."

"Properly, there is no other knowledge but that which is got by working; the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools; a thing floating in the clouds. endless logic vortices, till we try and fix it."

"Pin thy faith to no man’s sleeve. Has thou not two eyes of they own?"

"Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious."

"Rest is for the dead."

"Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself."

"See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it."

"Silence is more eloquent than words."

"Society is founded on hero-worship."

"Speech is of time, silence is of eternity."

"Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage."

"Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments, they are to be seen. This surely implies as its chief condition, a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration."

"The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home."

"The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity."

"That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in a minute, as by some computations it does."

"The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be noblest."

"The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong."

"The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once."

"The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician's Aphorism."

"The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence."

"The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it."

"The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem."

"The Highest Being reveals himself in man."

"The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb."

"The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness."

"The older I grow - and I now stand on the brink of eternity - the more comes back to me that sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.""

"The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all."

"The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike."

"The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers."

"The present is the living sum-total of the whole past."

"The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out there from, and, working, believe, lie be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself."

"The thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion."

"The Universe is but one vast symbol of God."

"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."

"The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha enough to destroy any comfort."

"The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth."

"The wealth of man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by."

"They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher; one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their “point of honor” and the like. Not by flattering our appetites - no, by awakening the heroic that slumbers in every heart can any religious gain follow."