Great Throughts Treasury

"True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment."

"Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."

"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all are agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better-looking than he had imagined."

"You may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma."

"Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action."

"God is in all that liberates and lifts; in all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles. A mystery of purpose gleaming through the secular confusion of the world, whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours."

"I don’t believe in principle but O, I do in interest."

"It is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it – that we demand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is impracticable."

"Not what we give, but what we share, for the gifts without the giver is bare; who gives himself with his alms feeds three - himself, his hungering neighbor and Me."

"The stock of ideas which mankind has to work with is very limited, like the alphabet, can at best have an air of freshness given it by new arrangements and combinations, or by application to new times and circumstances."

"The worst kind of religion is no religion at all."

"He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft."

"Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found. "

"Fate loves the fearless. "

"Folks never understand the folks they hate. "

"A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. "

"Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. "

"Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime. "

"Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty. "

"Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances."

"A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated."

"All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves."

"Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking."

"Humbleness is always grace, always dignity."

"The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere. "

"The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it. "

"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief. "

"There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends. "

"What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. "

"Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best."

"The idol is the measure of the worshiper."

"The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience."

"There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual."

"To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends."

"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all are agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better-looking than he had imagined."

"While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life."

"Whom the heart of man shuts out, sometimes the heart of God takes in, and fences them all round about with silence 'mid the world's loud din. "

"The future works out great men's destinies; the present is enough for common souls, who, never looking forward, are indeed mere clay wherein the footprints of their age are petrified forever."