Great Throughts Treasury

"The germs of all truth lie in the soul, and when the ripe moment comes, the truth within answers to the fact without as the flower responds to the sun, giving it form for heat and color for light."

"To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self."

"The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has."

"Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with the wind."

"In the long run a man becomes what he purposes, and gains for himself what he really desires."

"Nothing is lost upon a man who is bent upon growth; nothing wasted on one who is always preparing for - life by keeping eyes, mind and heart open to nature, men, books, experience - and what he gathers serves him at unexpected moments in unforeseen ways."

"A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been."

"Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love."

"Fair queen, at home there is none like thee, but over the mountains is Snow-white free, with seven little dwarfs, who are strange to see; a thousand times fairer than thou is she. Queen, thou art not the fairest now; Snow-white over the mountain's brow a thousand times fairer is than thou. Queen, thou art the fairest here, but not when Snow-white is near; over the mountains still is she, fairer a thousand times than thee."

"Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary."

"He strains his conversation through a cigar."

"I do not believe that the deeper problems of living can ever be answered by the process of thought. I believe that life itself teaches us either patience with regard to them, or reveals to us possible solutions when our hearts are pressed close against duties and sorrows and experiences of all kinds."

"Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life."

"The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants, but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best."

"Real freedom comes from the mastery, through knowledge, of historic conditions and race character which makes possible a free and intelligent use of experience for the purpose of progress."

"New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights."

"The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room."