Great Throughts Treasury

"Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason." - Blaise Pascal

"If you give your son only one gift, let it be enthusiasm." - Bruce Barton

"Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey

"Every man is enthusiastic at times. One man has enthusiasm for thirty minutes, another man has it for thirty days, but it is the man who has it for thirty years who makes a success in life." - Edward Burgess Butler

"One man has enthusiasm for 30 minutes, another for 30 days, but it is the man who has it for 30 years who makes a success of his life." - Edward Burgess Butler

"Let a man once see himself as others see him, and all enthusiasm vanishes from his heart." - Elbert Green Hubbard

"Be not afraid of enthusiasm; you need it; you can do nothing effectually without it." - François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot

"There is a sphere where the enthusiasm of love is the calm habit of the soul, that without words, without the demonstrations of affection, heart beats to heart, soul answers soul, we respond to the Infinite Love, and we feel his answer in us, and there is no need of words." - Harriet Beecher Stowe

"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The motives and purposes of authors are not always so pure and high, as, in the enthusiasm of youth, we sometimes imagine. To many the trumpet of fame is nothing but a tin horn to call them home, like laborers from the field, at dinner-time, and they think themselves lucky to get the dinner." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"In things pertaining to enthusiasm no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions." - Henry Ward Beecher

"In things pertaining to enthusiasm no man is sane who does know how to be insane on proper occasions." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Know what work you want to do and go after it. The young man who gets ahead must decide for himself what he wishes to do. From his own tastes, his own enthusiasm, how he must get the motive and the inspiration which are to start him on his way to a successful life." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. As long as there is the enthusiasm of the chase they enjoy it. But when they begin to look around and think of settling down, they find that that part by which joy enters in, is dead in them. They have spent their lives in heaping up colossal piles of treasure, which stand at the end, like the pyramids in the desert, holding only the dust of things." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representation of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish flow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind." - Immanuel Kant

"Great dejection often follows great enthusiasm." - Joseph Roux

"A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one." - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash

"Enthusiasm is contagious." - Norman Vincent Peale

"Success at anything requires two vital ingredients: enthusiasm and perseverance. Both can be helped by the broad view that looks beyond temporary difficulties and disappointments to a great goal... Enthusiasm is the priceless quality that makes everything different." - Norman Vincent Peale

"To have enthusiasm for life, act as if you did possess it and you shall have it." - Norman Vincent Peale

"It is impossible to combat enthusiasm with reason; for though it makes a show of resistance, it soon eludes the pressure, refers you to distinctions not to be understood, and feelings which it cannot explain." - Oliver Goldsmith

"You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips." - Oliver Goldsmith

"It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Enthusiasm goes out." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust." - Samuel Ullman

"Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind, it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness off the deep springs of life. Youth means the temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living." - Samuel Ullman

"Jung equates the unconscious with the soul, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable world, protected form all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of a burning enthusiasm. The soul, always drawn inward, seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experience of the underworld." - Thomas Moore

"By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages." - William Hazlitt

"Enthusiasm is the intoxication of earnestness." - Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine

"A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm." - Charles Schwab, fully Charles R. "Chuck" Schwab

"What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books! - If you bring to it not the obligation of the student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of the adventurer!" - David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker

"Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm. " - Earl Nightingale

"We were as nearly bored as enthusiasm would permit." - Edmund Gosse, fully Sir Edmund William Gosse

"Put yourself into life and never lose your openness, your childish enthusiasm throughout the journey that is life, and things will come your way." - Federico Fellini

"Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose." - Frank Tyger

"The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm in oneself, by poetry, by contemplation, by charity, - that is, in fewer words, the maintenance of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in its right place within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the whole work of God. Deep and grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and the eternal order, reason touched with emotion and a serene tenderness of heart - these surely are the foundations of wisdom. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Knowledge is power, but enthusiasm pulls the switch." - Ivern Ball

"If one is aware, one sees how through fear one’s concept of God arose; or perhaps there was a person who had an original experience of reality or of God and communicated it to another who in his greediness made it his own, and gave impetus to the process of imitation. Awareness is the process of completeness, and introspection is incomplete. The result of introspection is morbid, painful, whereas awareness is enthusiasm and joy." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man." - Jacques Ellul

"Innovation, creativity, and enthusiasm are all linked." - Judith Anderson, born Frances Margaret Anderson-Anderson, aka Dame Judith Anderson

"Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process. Enthusiasm - from the Greek, 'filled with God' - is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself." - Julia Cameron

"We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. Some have never truly loved anything but themselves - perhaps because their first outreachings were received with coldness and lack of sympathy and then love quickly turns putrid, and becomes greed, and lust, and turns even to self- disgust. Some confine their love to the narrow limits of the family, and then too love decays into sentimentality, or hardens into indifference. The couple that are wrapped up in themselves soon find the parcel uncomfortably tight; the mother who pours out her love on her child till both are smothered in a cocoon of sentiment soon tastes the bitter worm of ingratitude and ruins the very object of her love. There are few more depressing spectacles than the perennial “old grad,” who has never broken the bonds of collegiate enthusiasm or developed beyond the throaty lore of Alma Matriolatry. And the present day provides us with the awful spectacle of what an ingrown love of country can do, what fanatical hatreds and cruelties it can engender, and how again it can destroy the very object of its love." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

"Being retired means you can learn to play again. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul." - Luella F. Phelan