Great Throughts Treasury

"The greatest vested interest is not property, but ignorance."

"Reading, like prayer, remains one of our few private acts."

"Some words are like the old Roman galleys; largescaled and ponderous. They sit low in the water even when their cargo is light."

"The most important single thing in publishing is the English sentence, and the editor who cannot contemplate it again and again with a sense of wonder has not yet gained respect for the complexity of learning."

"I grieve that our senate has dwindled into a school of rhetoric."

"I have carefully and regularly perused these Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume, independently of its divine origin, contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than could be collected within the same compass from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written."

"The principal operations of nature are not the absolute annihilation and new creation of what we call material substances, but the temporary extinction and reproduction?or rather, in one word, the transmutation?of forms."

"If I am asked, Who is the greatest man? I answer, The best; and if I am required to say, Who is the best? I reply, He that has deserved most of his fellow-creatures. Whether we deserve better of mankind by the cultivation of letters, by obscure and inglorious attainments, by intellectual pursuits calculated rather to amuse than inform, than by strenuous exertions in speaking and acting, let those consider who busy themselves in studies unproductive of any benefit to their country or fellow-citizens, I think not."

"If elegance consists in the choice and collocation of words, you have a most indubitable title to it."

"We must have all observed that a speaker agitated with passion is perpetually changing the tone and pitch of his voice."