Great Throughts Treasury

"The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things."

"Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience."

"The history of past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present."

"Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves."

"If the higher companionship which love should be does not make men and women nobler, more generous, more ready to sacrifice even their beautiful life for a lofty purpose, there is a suspicion that their love is not love but a combination of egoisms."

"Ideas are the root of creation."

"It is not true that the relations between the sexes are of the same order with the rest of man’s instincts. They have social consequences which place them in a class apart."

"“Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name” "

"You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God."

"All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy."

"A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers."

"Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room."

"Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul."

"Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement."

"Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking."

"The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things."

"Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it."