Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Trust

"Just as a tested and rugged virtue of the moral hero is worth more than the lovely, tender, untried innocence of the child, so is the massive strength of a soul that has conquered truth for itself worth more than the soft peach-bloom faith of a soul that takes truth on trust." - Francis Ellington Abbot

"Virtue and sense are one; and, trust me, still a faithless heart betrays the head unsound." - John Armstrong

"Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give." - Phillips Brooks

"Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing; that which for the time annihilates reason, and leave our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart, is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love." -

"Sooner mayest thou trust thy pocket to a pickpocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew! Only when man weeps he should be alone, not because tars are weak, but they should be secret. Tears are akin to prayer - Pharisees parade prayers, impostors parade tears." -

"In politeness, as in many other things connected with the formation of character, people in general begin outside, when they should begin inside; instead of beginning with the heart, and trusting that to form the manners, they begin with the manners, and trust the heart to chance influences." -

"Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy." - Tyron Edwards

"Young love-making - that gossamer web!... The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life." - E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster

"He is well along the road to perfect manhood who does not allow the thousand little worries of life to embitter his temper, or disturb his equanimity. An undivided heart which worships God alone, and trust him as it should, is raised above anxiety for earthly wants." - John Cunningham Geikie

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Seize the day! Put no trust in the morrow." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

"Who trust in himself will lead and rule the swarm." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

"The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals." - William James

"Don’t be too hasty... to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men." -

"He seldom lives frugally who lives by chance. Hope is always liberal, and they that trust her promises make little scruple of reveling today on the profits of to-morrow." -

"It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust." -

"Life cannot be controlled. It is a mystery inviting us to participate, to risk, to trust fate, to accept the blank rune stone, the unknown. Surrender teaches us not so much to understand as to inhabit the mystery... Once we can accept the larger mystery of Life, we can consciously create within it." - Gloria D. Karpinski

"I would return good for good; I would also return good for evil. I would meet trust with trust; I would likewise meet suspicion with confidence." -

"Trust him with little who, without proofs, trusts you with everything, or, when he has proved you, with nothing." - Johann Kaspar Lavater

"If, like Jacob, you trust God in little things, He may answer you by great things." - James Ramsay MacDonald

"The man of belief is necessarily a dependent man... He does not belong to himself, but to the author of the idea he believes... At every step, one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender to it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life clings otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service...faith makes blessed: consequently, it lies." -

"Trust not yourself; but your defects to know. Make use of every friend - and every foe." - Alexander Pope

"A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else." - Cardinal de Retz, Jean Francois-Paul de Gondil

"I trust your wisdom only when it comes from the heart, your goodness when it comes from the mind." - Arthur Schnitzler

"Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears; the effect of precepts is therefore slow and tedious, whilst that of examples is summary and effectual." -

"Man is a spiritual being in that - unless he is badly corrupted - he responds powerfully to non-material stimuli: the beauty in nature or in art, the trust of children, the needs of helpless people, the death of a friend even though long absent." -

"Trust that man is nothing who has not a conscience in everything." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

"Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust." -

"I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God." - John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent

"Delude not yourself with the notion that you may be untrue and uncertain in trifles and in important things the contrary. Trifles make up existence, and give the observer the measure by which to trust; and the fearful power of habit, after a time, suffers not the best will to ripen into action." - Carl Maria von Weber, fully Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst, Freiherr (Baron) von Weber

"Confidence is a thing not to be produced by compulsion. Men cannot be forced into trust." - Daniel Webster

"Not everybody trust paintings but people believe photographs." - Ansel Adams

"Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read." - Alonzo of Arragon NULL

"It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant - birth, struggle, and death are constant - and so is love, though we may not always think so - and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths - change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not - safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, but which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope - the entire possibility - of freedom disappears." -

"Trust with a child-like dependence upon God, and you shall fear no evil." -

"Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful and fellowmen are dear, and duty is close beside us, and God is over us and in us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God”; for that, and that alone, is peace." - Phillips Brooks

"Trust not any man with thy life, credit, or estate. For it is mere folly for a man to enthrall himself to his friend, as though, occasion being offered, he should not dare to become an enemy." - William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 1st Baron Burghley, also Lord William Cecil Burleigh

"By His trials, God means to purify us, to take away all our self-confidence, and our trust in each other, and bring us into implicit, humble trust in Himself." - Horace Bushnell

"How simply I can trust in man, and how little in God! How unreasonable is a pure act of faith in one like ourselves, if we cannot repose the same faith in God." - Richard Cecil

"Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

"Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

"It is the easiest thing in the world for us to obey God when He command us to do what we like, and to trust Him when the path is all sunshine. The real victory of faith is to trust God in the dark, and through the dark. Let us be assured of this, that if the lesson and the rod are of His appointing, and that His all-wise love has engineered the deep tunnel of trial on the heavenward road, He will never desert us during the discipline. The vital thing for us is not to deny and desert Him." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

"The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith." - Russell Victor DeLong, possibly Bertrand Russell V. Delong

"There is something so beautiful in trust that even the most hardened liar must needs feel a certain respect for those who confide in him." - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police." - Albert Einstein

"No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"What can we take on trust in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness, pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps." - Euripedes NULL