Great Throughts Treasury

"Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out. "

"Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left. "

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."

"Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. "

"The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, 'The medicines of the soul.’ "

"The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce."

"The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. "

"To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad. "

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. "

"What refuge is there for the victim who is possessed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to read a hundred? "

"When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman? "

"When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. "

"Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts "

"Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes is a miser who always wants guineas for groats; he keeps all his customers still in arrears by lending them minutes and charging them years."

"Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded."

"Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the soul's wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable."

"Leverage is everything,--was what I used to say;--don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side."

"Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin. "

"Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified."

"Nobody talks much that doesn't say unwise things,--things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes."

"I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory."

"Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore."

"Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever WERE there, they ARE there still!"

"Language! the blood of the soul, sir, into which our thoughts run, and out of which they grow."

"Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking."

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your OPINION really want your PRAISE, and will be contented with nothing less."

"Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes upon soundings."

"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."

"A very desperate habit; one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his short-comings is from his apology."

"Apology is only egotism wrong side out."

"Books are the negative pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced."

"Don't be "consistent," but be simply true."

"Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him."

"Every real master of speaking or writing ores his personality as he would any other serviceable material; the very moment a speaker or writer begins to use it, not for his main purpose, but for vanity's sake, as all weak people are sure to do, hearers, and readers feel the difference in a moment."

"Genius does not herd with genius."

"I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre to a circle."

"Genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train."

"How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!"

"In dim cathedrals, dark with vaulted gloom, What holy awe invests the sacred tomb! There pride will bow, and anxious care expand, And creeping avarice come with open hand; The gay can weep, the impious can adore, From morn's first glimmerings on the chancel floor Till dying sunset shed his crimson stains Through the faint halos of the iris'd panes."

"Literature is full of coincidences which some love to believe plagiarisms."

"Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold."

"Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest light of truth."

"Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience."

"Silence! the pride of reason."

"Talk about conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet and renders it endurable. Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the seafowl's plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and the wave in which he dips. When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more."

"Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music."

"The clear, cold question chills to frozen doubt; Tired of beliefs, we dread to live without; O then, if reason waver at thy side, Let humbler Memory be thy gentle guide, Go to thy birth-place, and, if faith was there, Repeat thy father's creed, thy mother's prayer."

"The mind does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to the starvation point. "

"The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping-stones; how we get from one to the other, we do not know; something carries us; we do not take the step."