Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing is better than frustration for waking up the conscience." - Henry H. Haskins

"Never let your love for your profession overshadow your religious feeling. Depend on it that religion will strengthen, not weaken, your energies, and will not only make you a better sailor, but a superior man. Professional studies are not to be neglected; but, on the other hand, take care how you fall into the common error of believing they are the remedy for all the ills of life." - Benjamin R. Haydon

"'Tis better to make a good run than a bad stand." - M. V. Heberden, fully Mary Violet Heberden

"The civilization malaise, in a word, reflects the inability of a civilization directed to material improvement - higher incomes, better diets, miracles of medicine, triumphs of applied physics and chemistry - to satisfy the human spirit." - Robert Heilbroner, fully Robert Louis Heilbroner

"When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people, He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and there are still more pages possible." - Robert Henri

"Amongst all things, knowledge is truly the best thing: from its not being liable ever to be stolen, from its not being purchasable, and from its being imperishable...Learning is superior to beauty; learning is better than hidden treasure; learning is a companion on a journey to a strange country; learning is strength inexhaustible." - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

"It is a deep-seated belief on the part of almost all Americans that their success will be better assured as they help to build the success of others." - Paul G. Hoffman, fully Paul Gray Hoffman

"We live in the future. Even the happiness of the present is made up mostly of that delightful discontent which the hope of better things inspires." -

"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

"When Goethe says that in every human condition foes lie in wait for us, “invincible only by cheerfulness and equanimity,” he does not mean that we can at all times be really cheerful, or at a moment’s notice; but that the endeavor to look at the better side of things will produce the habit, and that this habit is the surest safeguard against the danger of sudden evils." - James Henry Leigh Hunt

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." - Dolores Ibarruri, aka “La Pasaonaria”

"Scenery seems to wear in one's consciousness better than any other element in life." - William James

"If you develop your natural gift, there’s no better satisfaction in life, no better purpose... The basic key to having a happy life is to live until you know you’re satisfied." - Angelo Jaspe

"The universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has the tendency to think in a way which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical. It begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." -

"To travel hopefully is better than to arrive." -

"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." - Thomas Jefferson

"If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

"Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none at all and even the best cannot be expected to run quite true." -

"The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it." -

"Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate; and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own." -

"No government is better than the men who compose it." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"Research... is nothing but a state of mind - a friendly, welcoming attitude toward change; going out to look for a change instead of waiting for it to come. Research, for practical men, is an effort to do things better." - Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering

"When a man has gone astray to the point of perdition and is about to sink, his last speech, the sign, is: "And yet something better in me is being lost."" - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

"Make a rule, and pray to God to help you to keep it, never, if possible, to lie down at night without being able to say: "I have made one human being at least a little wiser, or a little happier, or at least a little better this day."" - Charles Kingsley

"History is a better guide than good intention." - Jeane Kirkpatrick

"In the business of life, Man is the only product. And there is only one direction in which man can possibly develop if he is to make a better living or yield a bigger dividend to himself, to his race, to nature or to God. He must grow in knowledge, wisdom, kindliness and understanding." - V. C. Kitchen, fully Victor C. Kitchen

"I believe that the fewer the laws in a home the better; but there is one law which should be as plainly understood as the shining of the sun is visible at noonday, and that is, implicit and instantaneous obedience from the child to the parent, not only for the peace of the home, but for the highest good of the child." - Abbott Elliot Kittredge

"Intelligence is derived from two words - inter and legere - inter meaning "between" and legere meaning "to choose." An intelligent person, therefore, is one who has learned "to choose between." He knows that good is better than evil, that confidence should supersede fear, that love is superior to hate, that gentleness is better than cruelty, forbearance than intolerance, compassion than arrogance and that truth has more virtue than ignorance." - J. Martin Klotsche

"There is not one grain the universe, either too much or too little, nothing to be added, nothing to be spared; nor so much as any one particle of it, that mankind may not be either the better or the worse for according as it is applied." - Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange

"The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think." -

"You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be." - Johann Kaspar Lavater

"If a man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will not only beat a path to his door, it will make newsreels of him and his wife in beach pajamas, it will discuss his diet and his health, it will publish heart-throb stories of his love life." - Newman Levy

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it." - Abraham Lincoln

"The better part of one's life consists of his friendships." - Abraham Lincoln

"Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?" - Abraham Lincoln

"Only the insider can make the decisions, not because he is inherently a better man, but because he is so placed that he can understand and can act." - Walter Lippmann

"Better a certain peace than a hoped for victory." - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL

"Better late than never." - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL

"He that takes away reason to make way for revelation puts out the light of both, and does much the same as if he would persuade a man to put out his eyes the better to receive the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope." - John Locke

"Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls." - James Russell Lowell

"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all are agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better-looking than he had imagined." - James Russell Lowell

"What can give us surer knowledge than our senses? With what else can we better distinguish the true from the false?" - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL

"She probably labored under the common delusion that you made things better by talking about them." - Rose Macauley, fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay

"Benefits should be granted little by little, so that they may be better enjoyed." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

"I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

"You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come." - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

"Education is a persistent dream often interrupted by the nightmare of a sobering actuality. We should not be afraid to dream, for today's dream of a better world may be tomorrow's reality." - Frederick Mayer

"Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken