Great Throughts Treasury

"Men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors."

"Men's prayers are a disease of the will."

"Men sheds grief as his skin sheds rain"

"Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals."

"Nature is an endless combination and repetition of very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations."

"Nature is loved by what is best in us."

"Nature is no sentimentalist, does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons."

"Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature?"

"Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended."

"Nature is sanitive, refining, elevating. How cunning she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch; of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purpose with the bloom of youth and joy."

"Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them."

"Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike."

"Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul."

"Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself."

"Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit."

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in ever fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."

"No great man ever complains of want of opportunity."

"No man speaks the truth or lives a true live two minutes together."

"No man can do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance."

"No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but that two or three words can dishearten it; and there is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress."

"No manners are finer than even the most awkward manifestations of good will to others... Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices."

"No matter how often defeated, you are born to victory."

"No power of genius has ever yet have the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains."

"No sensible person ever made an apology."

"Noblesse oblige: or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity."

"Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride."

"Nothing astonishes men as much as common sense and plain dealings."

"Nothing external to you has any power over you."

"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in his duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? The debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?"

"One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe."

"No truth is so sublime but it may be seen to be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thought."

"Nothing in the universe so solid as a thought."

"Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, of the statue right to vote, by those who never dared to think or to act."

"Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches and, to make knowledge valuable you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind."

"Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money’s worth, except for these."

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

"One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all one pattern. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion."

"One of the illusion is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday."

"Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds; our language, our science, our religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited."

"Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality."

"One must be an inventor to read well... There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world."

"Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!"

"People fancy they hate poetry and they are all poets and mystics."

"Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds."

"Only by the supernatural is a man strong - only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist - nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral."

"People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them."

"People see only what they are prepared to see."

"Perpetual moderness is the measure of merit in every work of art."

"Poverty consists in feeling poor."