Great Throughts Treasury

"Imagination is a very high sort of seeing."

"In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed and the quest sees now how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith."

"In failing circumstances no man can be relied on to keep his integrity."

"Is not prayer also a study of truth – a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations and see it in the light of thought, shall at the same time kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation."

"It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"It is one of the illusions that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. No man has earned anything rightly until he knows that every day is doomsday. Today is a king in disguise… Let us not be deceived, let us unmask the king as he passes."

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."

"Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide and break them up, and draw individuals out of them."

"It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole."

"It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and sending it to perform one more turn through the cycle of beings, wrote “not transferable” and “good for this trip only,” on these garments of the soul."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"Let me consider this as a resolution by which I pledge myself to act in all variety of circumstances and to which I must recur often in times of carelessness and temptation – to measure my conduct by the rule of conscience."

"Love is our highest word, and the synonym of God."

"Majorities, the argument of fools, the strength of the weak."

"Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy."

"Life is ecstasy."

"Man is a god in ruins."

"Men… measure their esteem of each other by what each has, not by what each is."

"Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thing, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men."

"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is to you."

"Most men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are must luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals."

"Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means."

"No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character."

"No man has learned anything until he knows that every day is the Judgment Day."

"Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them."

"None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone."

"Nature is saturated with deity."

"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

"No man every prayed heartily without learning something."

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

"Nothing is at last sacred by the integrity of your own mind."

"One of the illusion of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year."

"Only by the supernatural is man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist."

"Our faith comes in moments, our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences."

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."

"Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; `tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much."

"Religion is the relation of the soul to God, and therefore the progress of sectarianism marks the decline of religion. Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference."

"Reward of an act is to have done it."

"Poetry begins… when we look from the center outward."

"Sad is this continual postponement of life."

"So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains."

"That which I hate and fear is really in myself."

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs."

"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."

"The builder of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature as that the religion, that is, the public nature, should fall out: the public and the private element, like north and south, like inside and outside, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every soul, and cannot be subdued except the soul is dissipated. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions."

"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language."

"The alternations of speaking and hearing make our education."

"The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor."

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."