Great Throughts Treasury

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

Christian Nestell Bovee

American Author, Editor

"Bad taste is a species of bad morals."

"Character is very much a matter of health."

"Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented."

"Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave. For cowards the road of desertion should be left open. They will carry over to the enemy nothing but their fears. The poltroon, like the scabbard, is an encumbrance when once the sword is drawn."

"Dishonesty is forsaking of permanent for temporary advantage."

"Doubt whom you will, but never yourself."

"Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties. It is the cause of patience; gives endurance; overcomes pain; strengthens weakness; braves dangers; sustains hope; makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them."

"Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones."

"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire. A generous habit of thought and action carries with it an incalculable influence."

"Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness."

"Few minds wear out; more rust out."

"Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it."

"Honesty is not only “the first step towards greatness” - it is greatness itself."

"Kindness is a language the dumb can speak, and the deaf can hear and understand."

"Our first and last love is - self-love."

"Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence."

"Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil."

"Pure motives do not insure perfect results."

"Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. "The great felicity of life," says Seneca, "is to be without perturbations.""

"Self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures. In the assurance of strength; there is strength, and they; are the; weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers."

"Self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures. In the assurance of strength, there is strength, and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers."

"Something of a person's character may be discovered by observing how he smiles."

"Successful love takes a load off our hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders."

"Tearless grief bleeds inwardly."

"The beauty seen, is partly in him who sees it."

"The body of the sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul."

"Hope is the best part of our riches. What sufficeth it that we have the wealth of the Indies in our pockets, if we have not the hope of heaven in our souls?"

"The extent of poverty in the world is much exaggerated. Our sensitiveness makes half our poverty; our fears - anxieties for ills that never happen - a greater part of the other half."

"The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse."

"The small courtesies sweeten life; the great ennoble it."

"The worst deluded are the self-deluded."

"There is great beauty in going through life fearlessly. Half our fears are baseless, the other half discreditable."

"A good thought is a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked, then he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the man who is the first to quote it to us."

"A panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a gong over to the enemy, of our imagination."

"Active natures are rarely melancholy. Activity and sadness are incompatible."

"All men are like in their lower nature; it is in their higher characters that they differ."

"As many suffer from too much as too little. A fat body makes a lean mind."

"Difficulties, by bracing the mind to overcome the, assist cheerfulness, as exercise assists digestion."

"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence."

"He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself."

"Ideas are, like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down, so to speak, to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings the way is never ending, and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable."

"In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at."

"Intellectually, as well as politically, the direction of all true progress is toward greater freedom, and long an endless succession of ideas."

"It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore."

"It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons."

"It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it."

"Justice, not the majority, should rule."

"Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sights are the signs of its greatest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness."

"Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity."

"Mind unemployed is mind unenjoyed."