Great Throughts Treasury

"As a philosophy, Pessimism is self-destructive. The mind which conceives the good and the ideal is made in the same breath to deny their value."

"We cannot leave behind what has once been true, for progress is an advance into truth, a deeper appreciation and love of what is familiar, be it a birthright, or a gift such as Revelation."

"The peculiar character of an individual human being is distinction from an atom lies in this, that he is the owner of himself and responsible to himself."

"As the artist creates patterns in a vain effort to catch a beauty which escapes him, because it is behind his thought and never realized in what he sees, so the love of God beckons and draws the soul of man, though he has never heard the sacred Name."

"Novelists seldom write for a believing public; they take for granted that their readers will be as themselves, that is, human beings without a definite standard of morals, without preconceived conceptions of truth."

"Leave Him [God] out of our explanations, and the life of thought is decapitated... Without God, everything dries up."