Great Throughts Treasury

"If you limit the search for truth and forbid men anywhere, in any way, to seek knowledge, you paralyze the vital force of truth itself."

"Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues."

"Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children."

"Someday, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now... Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process."

"The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing -- where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do."

"The true way to be humble is not to stoop till thou art smaller than thyself, but to stand at thy real height against some higher nature that will show thee what the real smallness of thy greatness is."

"As the Master Wills: Slowly, through all the universe, the temple of God is being built. Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone. When, in your hard fight, in your tiresome drudgery, or in your terrible temptation, you catch the purpose of your being, and give yourself to God, and so give Him the chance to give Himself to you, your life, a living stone, is taken up and set into that growing wall. Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely ways;-there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple. Oh, if the stone can only have some vision of the temple of which it is to be a part forever, what patience must fill it as it feels the blows of the hammer, and knows that success for it is simply to let itself be wrought into what shape the Master wills."

"As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it ... you cannot do everything."

"Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from."

"Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious."

"Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours."

"Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end."

"Christianity knows no truth, which is not the child of love and the parent of duty."

"Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to take in his pasteboard cap, so as not to throw his shadow upon the work in which he was engaged."

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall not be a miracle, but you yourself shall be the miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself: At the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God."

"Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully."

"Every sermon must have a solid rest in Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to well-thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal."

"Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use."

"Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him."

"For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small."

"Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours. Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious."

"Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power."

"Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness."

"Greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small."

"Happiness is the natural flower of duty."

"He made little, too little of sacraments and priests, because God was so intensely real to him. What should he do with lenses who stood thus full in the torrent of the sunshine."

"I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back."

"If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing."

"If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to give healthy exercise to the charitable impulses."

"If you could only know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that 'the time is short,' how it would break the spell? How you would go instantly and do the thing, which you might never have another chance to do!"

"It is good for us to think no grace or blessing truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us."

"It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you."

"It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened."

"Joy in one?s work is the consummate tool."

"Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end."

"Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith? to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants."

"Newton?s great generalization, which he called the ?third law of motion,? was that ?Action and reaction are always equal to each other;? and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force, one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature."

"No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind."

"O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by; yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light; the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee to-night."

"O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God."

"Oh, my dear friends,--you who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day,--if you only could know and see and feel that the time is short, how it would break the spell! How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do!"

"Patience, Life, Short Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones."

"Prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward."

"Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it."

"So shall we join the disciples of our Lord, keeping faith in Him in spite of the crucifixion, and making ready, by our loyalty to Him in the days of His darkness, for the time when we shall enter into His triumph in the days of His light. And the beauty of it is that the same method runs throughout the disciples' work which ran through His work. Christ's method is repeating itself in the work of His disciples for ever and ever. As He who first gained the great victory overcame by undergoing the power of evil, shall we be surprised if that is the sort of victory that God calls upon us to gain? It is the victory which it is always the best to gain which makes the richest victory for any soul."

"Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself."

"The absence of sentimentalism in Christ?s relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching."

"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter."

"The copy-books tell us that "to err is human." That is wrong. To err is inhuman, to be holy is to live in the straight line of duty and of truth to God's life in every intrinsic existence."

"The danger facing all of us--let me say it again, for one feels it tremendously--is not that we shall make an absolute failure of life, nor that we shall fall into outright viciousness, nor that we shall be terribly unhappy, nor that we shall feel that life has no meaning at all--not these things. The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God--and be content to have it so--that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life--and have really missed life itself. For life without God, to one who has known the richness and joy of life with Him, is unthinkable, impossible. That is what one prays one's friends may be spared--satisfaction with a life that falls short of the best, that has in it no tingle and thrill which come from a friendship with the Father."