Great Throughts Treasury

"The lessons of adversity are often the most benignant when they seem the most severe. The depression of vanity sometimes ennobles the feeling. The mind which does not wholly sink under misfortune rises above it more lofty than before, and is strengthened by affliction."

"Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason."

"Lord, what a change within us one short hour Spent in Thy presence will avail to make! "

"Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, Or others--that we are not always strong-- That we are sometimes overborne with care-- That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or troubled--when with us is prayer, And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?"

"What question can be here? Your own true heart Must needs advise you of the only part: That may be claim'd again which was but lent, And should be yielded with no discontent, Nor surely can we find herein a wrong, That it was left us to enjoy it long."

"Speak but little and well, if you would be esteemed as a man of merit."

"You cannot impart to any man more than the words which he understands either now contain or can be made intelligibly to him to contain."

"As shadows attend substances, so words follow upon things."

"Best friends might loathe us, if what things perverse we know of our own selves they also knew."

"Even the world, that despises simplicity, does not profess to approve of duplicity."

"Faction is the excess and abuse of party."

"It was Lazarus' faith, not his poverty, which brought him into Abraham's bosom."

"Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which unless fixed and arrested might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing as the lightning."

"None but God can satisfy the longings of an immortal soul; that as the heart was made for Him, so He only can fill it."

"Not all who seem to fail have failed indeed, Not all who fail have therefor worked in vain. There is no failure for the good and brave."

"Oh seize the instant time; you never will With water once passed by impel the mill."

"Sin may be clasped so close, we cannot see its face."

"The love of our own language, what is it, in fact, but the love of our country expressing itself in one particular direction?"

"The mind which does not wholly sink under misfortune rises above it more lofty than before, and is strengthened by affliction."

"The present is only intelligible in the light of the past."

"The sin of pride is the sin of sins; in which all subsequent sins are included, as in their germ; they are but the unfolding of this one."

"Thou cam'st not to thy place by accident, It is the very place God meant for thee; And should'st thou there small room for action see, Do not for this give room for discontent."

"We kneel, how weak; we rise, how full of power! Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, Or others--that we are not always strong, That we are ever overborne with care, That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?"

"We speak of persons as jovial, as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and the happiest augury of all. A gloomy person was said to be saturnine, as being born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those who owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself."

"As the kernel of old humanity, Noah and his family, was once contained in the ark, which was tossed upon the waves of the deluge; so the kernel of the new humanity, of the new creation, Christ and His Apostles, in the little ship."

"For we must share, if we would keep, that blessing from above; Ceasing to give, we cease to have; such is the law of love."

"He has brought himself to this state; he has exposed his heart as a common road to every evil influence of the world, till it has become hard as a pavement."

"If we with earnest effort could succeed To make our life one long, connected prayer, As lives of some, perhaps, have been and are; If, never leaving Thee, we have no need Our wandering spirits back again to lead Into Thy presence, but continued there Like angels standing on the highest stair Of the Sapphire Throne: this were to pray indeed!"

"Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance; it is laying hold of His highest willingness."

"We live not in our moments or our years: the present we fling from us like the rind of some sweet future, which we after find bitter to taste."