Great Throughts Treasury

"At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?' Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's." - Thomas Carlyle

"Silence is the eternal duty of man." - Thomas Carlyle

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts." - Thomas Carlyle

"Speech is silvern, silence is golden." - Thomas Carlyle

"Speech is the art of stifling and suspending thought." - Thomas Carlyle

"The heart always sees before than the head can see." - Thomas Carlyle

"Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself." - Thomas Carlyle

"What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity; not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine." - Thomas Carlyle

"Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks." - Thomas Hardy

"Smile out; but still suffer: the paths of love are rougher than thoroughfares of stones." - Thomas Hardy

"The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit." - Thomas Hardy

"The law is more easily understood by few than many words. For all words are subject to ambiguity, and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the law is multiplication of ambiguity. Besides, it seems to imply (by too much diligence) that whosoever can evade the words is without the compass of the law." - Thomas Hobbes

"There is even a happiness - that makes the heart afraid." - Thomas Hood

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Thomas Jefferson

"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." - Thomas Jefferson

"Its soul, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My god! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!" - Thomas Jefferson

"Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us." - Thomas Jefferson

"The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest." - Thomas Jefferson

"Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only." - Thomas Jefferson

"A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"The oldest language, they say, Indo-European, Indo-European, which is Sanskrit. But it is almost certain that this is a great is so rashly like many others, and that there has been a re-older mother tongue, which decided the roots of the Aryan both as well as the Semitic and chamitischen dialects in itself. She probably has been spoken on Atlantis, whose silhouette is the final distance indistinct haze still visible Vorbirgskulisse the past, but which itself is hardly the original home of the people speaking well." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work. Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace. Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. It helps the soul to focus upon its spiritual aims and to achieve them. But the whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposelessness, and to induce a false feeling that 'we are getting somewhere'." - Thomas Merton

"But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things a he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence." - Thomas Merton

"Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it." - Thomas Merton

"For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self." - Thomas Merton

"I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: At most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another." - Thomas Merton

"I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to." - Thomas Merton

"I think the chief reason we have so little joy is that we take ourselves too seriously." - Thomas Merton

"If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him." - Thomas Merton

"It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that we can and should develop our spiritual union with God." - Thomas Merton

"Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia." - Thomas Merton

"One must not be too quickly preoccupied with professing definitively what is true and what is false. Not that true and false do not matter. But if at every instant one wants to grasp the whole and perfect truth of a situation, particularly a concrete and limited situation in history or in politics, one only deceives and blinds himself. Such judgments are only rarely and fleetingly possible, and sometimes, when we think we see what is most significant, it has very little meaning at all. So it is possible that the moment of my death may turn out to be, from a human and ‘economic’ point of view, the most meaningless of all. Meanwhile, I do not have to stop the flow of events in order to understand them. On the contrary, I must move with them or else what I think I understand will be no more than an image in my own mind." - Thomas Merton

"This whole attitude of abstraction, of hatred and denigration of the body, has finally led to a pathological and totally unrealistic obsession with bodily detail … [in consequence of which] love becomes no longer an expression of the communion between persons… Instead of saying that an act is pure when you remove all that is material, sensuous, fleshly, emotional, passionate, etc., from it, we will on the contrary say that a sexual act is pure when it gives a rightful place to the body, the senses, the emotions …, the special needs of the person, all that is called for by the unique relationship between the two lovers, and that is demanded by the situation in which they find themselves… It is precisely in this spirit of celebration, gratitude, and joy that true purity is found." - Thomas Merton

"We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture." - Thomas Merton

"Why can we not be content with an ordinary, secret, personal happiness that does not need to be explained or justified? We feel guilty if we are not happy in some publically approved way, if we do not imagine that we are meeting some standard of happiness that is recognized by all. God gives us the gift and the capacity to make our own happiness out of our own situation. And it is not hard to be happy, simply by accepting what is within reach, and making of it what we can." - Thomas Merton

"You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt." - Thomas Merton

"Remote from man, with God he passed the days, Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise." - Thomas Parnell

"The babbling sounds that mimic echo plays, The fairy shade, and its eternal maze? Nature and Art in all their charms combin'd, And all Elysium to one view confin'd! " - Thomas Tickell

"To Morning - O Holy virgin! clad in purest white, Unlock heav’n’s golden gates, and issue forth; Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring The honey’d dew that cometh on waking day. O radiant morning, salute the sun Rous’d like a huntsman to the chase, and with Thy buskin’d feet appear upon our hills." - William Blake

"Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear." - William Blake

"Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are." - William Barclay

"In conclusion, I have endeavored, with what success has been already determined by the voice of my own country, to give a panorama of Irish life among the people … and in doing this, I can say with solemn truth that I painted them honestly and without reference to the existence of any particular creed or party." - William Carleton

"Where modesty's ill manners, 'tis but fitThat impudence and malice pass for wit." - William Congreve

"They that fight for freedom undertake the noblest cause mankind can have at stake. Still ending, and beginning still." - William Cowper

"Hushed be the camps to-day. No more for him life's stormy conflicts, nor victory, nor defeat ? no more time's dark events." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me; O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you; never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night, by the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon, the messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within, the unknown want, the destiny of me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"When I read the book, the biography famous, and is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will someone when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed and the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, and thought of him I love." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Here's to your good health, and your family's good health, and may you all live long and prosper." - Washington Irving