Great Throughts Treasury

"Imagination is built upon knowledge."

"Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds."

"It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner.... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value—to myself, to my family, and to the world."

"A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission."

"It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress ..."

"Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful, the formation of fixed habits of work."

"My wife and I said good-bye the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks."

"It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better."

"It is in the nature of all passionate and uncontrolled emotion to prey upon and weaken the forces of reflective power, as much as it is in the nature of controlled emotion to strengthen them."

"It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value."

"Passion takes no count of time; peril marks no hours or minutes; wrong makes its own calendar; and misery has solar systems peculiar to itself."

"Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her."

"She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an hour."

"The great law of denial belongs to the powerful forces of life, whether the case be one of coolish baked beans, or an unrequited affection."

"Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn."

"They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn."

"Truth, like climate, is common property."

"The literary artist will... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more."

"What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motions of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason."

"While I may paint in the tints or outlines of rocks and beaches, dawns and harbor, fleet and wharf, I never draw portraits of my neighbors or of my friends."

"To Arthur love is a state, not a process; an atmosphere, not a study; an assurance, not a hope; a fact, not an ideal."

"Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?"