Great Throughts Treasury

"Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success." - Brian Adam

"One of the great arts in living is to learn the art of accurately appraising values. Everything that we think, that we earn, that we have given to us, that in any way touches our consciousness, has its own value. These values are apt to change with the mood, with time, or because of circumstances. We cannot safely tie to any material value. The values of all material possessions change continually, sometimes over night. The real values are those that stay by you, give you happiness and enrich you. They are the human values." - George Matthew Adams

"Our religious art is advertising. Our sainthood is fame." -

"Make no man your idol; for the best man must have faults, and his faults will usually become yours in addition to your own. This is as true in art as in morals." -

"Moral virtue can be without some of the intellectual virtues, namely, wisdom, science and art, but not without understanding and prudence. Moral virtue cannot be without prudence, because moral virtue is habit of choosing, that is, making us choose well." -

"It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them." - Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

"Art is the soul of the people." - Romare Bearden, fully Romate Howard Bearden

"When hospitality becomes an art, it loses its very soul." - Max Beerbohm, fully Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm

"The Art of Teaching does not consist only of instruction in the three R's. There is more to teaching than conveying information. Teaching is the continuous process of building character, establishing moral attitudes, creating respect for the good way of life and distaste for the lightheaded and irresponsible mode of existence." - Samuel Belkin

"In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me? " - Saul Bellow

"In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it thou art a fool." -

"Sociability is the art of unlearning to be preoccupied with yourself." - Otto Blumenthal

"It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue." - Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

"The highest part of the art of life is the expectation of miracles." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall

"You need more tact in the dangerous art of giving than in any other social action." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall

"Learn the great art of being small." - Joseph Hayyim Brenner

"Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect." -

"Nothing conveys a more inaccurate idea of a whole truth than a part of a truth so prominently brought forth as to throw the other parts into shadow. This is the art of caricature." -

"The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application. " - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue." - William Cowper

"The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then to fix it in form." - Francois Delsarte

"The whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears in individuals, is not as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings which have been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition." - John Dewey

"Wrinkles of the face may be successfully hidden by art; not so with the wrinkles of the heart." - Madame Dufresnoy, fully Madame Frederique Anne Dufresnoy

"Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you don't believe yourself." - Abba Eban, born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban

"Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse." - Henry Fielding

"Time is short and art is long." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Maturity implies otherness... The art of living is the art of living with." - J. L. Gordon

"In the world men must be dealt with according to what they are, and not to what they ought to be; and the great art of life is to find out what they are, and act with them accordingly." - Stephen Grellet, born Étienne de Grellet du Mabillier

"Thinking is a strenuous art - few practice it: and then only at rare times." -

"A Whole combination of knowledge, insight, abilities and skills as well as moral virtue and spiritual excellence, make up the art of the wifely home-builder." - Samson Raphael Hirsch

"Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling." - Hans Hoffman

"Great art is an instant arrested in eternity." - James G. Huneker, fully James Gibbons Huneker

"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." - William James

"It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive... that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present." -

"The true art of memory is the art of attention." -

"To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life." -

"Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and fortune." - John Knox

"Every desire for power, ability, wisdom, harmony, life, greatness will impress itself upon the subconscious and will cause the thing desired to be produced in the great within. What is produced in the within will come forth into expression in the personality; therefore, by knowing how to impress the subconscious, man may give his personal self any quality desired, in any quantity desired. What man may desire to become, that he can become, and the art of directing and impressing the subconscious is the secret. The perpetual awakening of the great within will produce a greatness, because to the powers and the possibilities of the great within there is no limit, neither is there any end." - Christian D. Larson

"The whole art of practical success consists in concentrating all efforts at all times upon one point." - Ferdinand Lassalle

"The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of human nature; and what nature will be honor who honors not the human?" - Johann Kaspar Lavater

"Life means love. We are here for love. Only love is real and everything is real thanks to love. We are nomads wandering through illusionary space. How to make it real? Only by destroying limits that separate us from others. No violence, no attempts at escape can help, only love. Too often love is more painful than joyful. The instances of love are much shorter than the periods during which we wait for love to emerge. The meaning of living is mastering the art of waiting." - Georgii Litichevsky Semenovich

"The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems." - S. L. A. Marshall, Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall

"Work is the true elixir of life. The busiest man is the happiest man. Excellence in any art or profession is attained only by hard and persistent work. Never believe that you are perfect. When a man imagines, even after years of striving, that he has attained perfection, his decline begins." - Theodore Martin, fully Sir Theodore Martin

"He alone has lost the art to live who cannot win new friends." - Silas Weir Mitchell

"Here is a wonder: we have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it. On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art. But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"I believe it to be true that dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Art is reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty and the imprisoning of it in a tangible dream." - George Jean Nathan

"To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination." - George Jean Nathan