Great Throughts Treasury

"Power educates the potentate."

"Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow."

"Right is more beautiful than private affection, and is compatible with universal wisdom."

"Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view."

"Progress is the activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow."

"Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference."

"Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions."

"Sad spectacle that man should live and be fed that he may fill a paragraph in the newspaper for his wonderful age, as we record the weight and girth of the Big Ox and Mammoth Girl. We don't count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."

"Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

"Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means."

"Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses."

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances, Strong men believe in cause and effect."

"Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God."

"So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours."

"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, driveling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth."

"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts."

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where molt the wings which bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of their men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time worn yoke of their opinions."

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man, when duty whispers low, "Thou must," the youth replies, "I can.""

"Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is no amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lose the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun."

"Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."

"Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing."

"Souls are not saved in bundles."

"Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today."

"Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world."

"Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce."

"Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to a new power as a benefactor."

"That we are here is proof that we ought to be here."

"Spiritual force is stronger than material; thoughts rule the world."

"Talent finds its models, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within."

"Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors."

"That which we are we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily."

"That which we are, we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily."

"The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume."

"The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine."

"The beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary."

"The best part of health is fine disposition."

"The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of life."

"The classes of citizens are three. The rich are useless, always lusting after more. Those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues; their malice stings the owners. Of the three, the middle part saves cities: it guards the order a community establishes."

"The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it."

"The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness."

"The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadwood, or canals, or statues, or songs."

"The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work - declining from your main design, to serve a turn here or there."

"The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it."

"The education of the will is the object of our existence. Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."

"The faith that stand on authority is not faith."

"The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust."

"The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul."

"The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet."

"The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed."