Great Throughts Treasury

"This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or another, we pay for her favors; or we go away empty."

"A good message will always find a messenger."

"All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves."

"But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?"

"But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung."

"Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt is already accomplished."

"Don?t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful; there is no beatitude for the despairing."

"Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly."

"Friends make life bearable. But I have certainty enough, for i am sure of you."

"Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it."

"I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life."

"It is not that we have a soul, we are a soul."

"It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it."

"Kindness is always fashionable, and always welcome."

"Injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others."

"In all troublous events we may find comfort, though it be only in the negative admission that things might have been worse."

"It is little men know of women; their smiles and their tears alike are seldom what they seem."

"It is always the simple that produces the marvelous."

"Old age is the verdict of life."

"Perhaps when the light of heaven shows us clearly the pitfalls and dangers of the earth road that led to the heavenly city, our sweetest songs of gratitude will be not for the troubles we have conquered, but for those we have escaped."

"Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition..."

"Spiritual favors are not always to be looked for, and not always to be relied on."

"That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life."

"The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much"

"The great difference between voyages rests not in ships but in the people you meet on them."

"Let me tell thee, time is a very precious gift of God; so precious that it's only given to us moment by moment."

"No man was ever ruined from without; the final ruin comes from within, when you turn hopeless and lose courage!"

"Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly."

"The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them."

"The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful."

"There are no little events in life, those we think of no consequence may be full of fate, and it is at our own risk if we neglect the acquaintances and opportunities that seem to be casually offered, and of small importance."

"There is no corner too quiet, or too far away, for a woman to make sorrow in it."

"This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or other, we pay for her favors; or we go empty away."

"Time is a very precious gift- so precious that it is only given to us moment by moment."

"Truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech."

"We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts we get under no other condition."

"What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves."

"Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural."

"When men make themselves into brutes it is just to treat them like brutes."

"With renunciation life begins."