Great Throughts Treasury

"An understanding of beauty and enthusiasm for it are one and the same."

"As an artist, you should not wish to create what you don?t feel you have to create."

"Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers."

"Be patient with the belligerence of the simple-minded. It is not easy to understand that one doesn't understand."

"Believe flatterers and you?re lost; believe your enemies?and you despair."

"Blessed is trust, for it blesses both those who have it to give and those who receive it."

"Chance is necessity hidden behind a veil."

"Commonly understood, that is to say: understood by common people, and beyond that it not seldom also means: unpalatable to the un-common people."

"Conquer, but don't triumph."

"Consider well before you immerse yourself in solitude whether your own company will be good for you."

"Dealing with egotists is so corrupting because we gradually fall into their mistakes out of self-defense."

"Dilettantes have not achieved anything lasting even in the applied arts. But they have rendered some service to the highest of all disciplines: philosophy. Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues are proof of this."

"Do not consider yourself deprived because your dreams were not fulfilled; the truly deprived have never dreamed."

"Do your duty until it becomes your joy."

"Enthusiasm does not always speak for those who arouse it, but always for those who experience it."

"Even a stopped clock is right twice every day. After some years, it can boast of a long series of successes."

"Even virtue is an art; and even its devotees are divided into those who practise it and those who are merely amateurs."

"Fear not those who argue but those who dodge."

"Genius points the way; talent pursues it."

"Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom"

"Hate only injustice and not those who commit it."

"However much you paid for a beautiful illusion, you got a bargain."

"If art finds the temple closed, then it flees into the workshop."

"If there be a faith that can move mountains, it is faith in one's own power."

"If there is a faith which can move mountains, then it is a faith in one's own strength."

"If you have one good idea, people will lend you twenty."

"If you walk down a well-trodden path long enough, you eventually end up alone."

"In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life."

"Indifference and contempt will always be able to take on an aura of intellectual superiority over sympathy and love for others."

"Indifference of every kind is reprehensible, even indifference towards one?s self."

"It is a characteristic of the great that they demand far less of other people than of themselves."

"It is difficult to see the person who admires us as stupid."

"It is not those who argue who are to be feared but those who evade argument."

"It is unfortunate that a good talent and a good man seldom come together."

"Like body and soul theory and practice are one, and like body and soul they are for the most part at loggerheads."

"Misanthropy is a suit of armor lined with thorns."

"Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good."

"No one is so keen to gather ever newer impressions as those who do not know how to process the old ones."

"None are so inconsiderate as those who demand nothing of life other than their own personal comfort."

"Not what we experience, but how we perceive what we experience, determines our fate."

"Nothing is less promising than precociousness; the young thistle looks much more like a future tree than the young oak."

"Nothing is so often and so irrevocably missed as the opportunity which crops up daily."

"Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity."

"Nothing makes us more cowardly and unconscionable than the desire to be loved by everyone."

"Nowadays people are born to find fault. When they look at Achilles, they see only his heel."

"Oh happy pessimists! What a joy it is to them to be able to prove again and again that there is no joy."

"Old age either transfigures or stultifies."

"Old age transfigures or fossilizes."

"One has to do good in order for it to exist in the world."

"One of the main goals of self-education is to eradicate that vanity in us without which we would never have been educated."