Great Throughts Treasury

"Remembrance of hopes that were silly has an especial tenderness, for much of their silliness came from a thoughtless credulity which we would be glad to have back again."

"Some have half-baked ideas because their ideals are not heated up enough."

"Sedate ignorance is the last stage of deterioration."

"Some live lies who won?t tell them; some tell lies who won?t live them."

"Some people are like wheelbarrows; useful only when pushed, and very easily upset. The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing."

"The darkness around us might somewhat light up if we would first practice using the light we have on the place we are."

"The deadliest contagion is majority opinion."

"The highest grades of humanity have passed through the millstones more than once."

"The man who feels that he must be hopeful and cheerful to get along ignores the careers of some pretty successful misanthropes."

"The man who has a dogmatic creed has more time left for his business."

"The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn."

"The art of a pedant is to divert his pupils from noticing the smallness of his puddle, and to make them attribute his apparent size to his being a really big toad."

"Some talk in quarto volumes and act in pamphlets."

"Symbols have a trick of stealing the show away from the thing they stand for."

"Stand aloof from your own opinions; they seek to lure you with an illusive certainty."

"The rare individual who has learned to govern himself is too fed up with the labor of it to want to govern anybody else."

"The things we counterfeit are not worth the trouble of falling into disgrace with ourselves."

"The tongues of conscience need a conscience of their own to keep them from speaking before they know what they are talking about."

"The unfortunate who has to travel for amusement lacks capacity for amusement."

"The way to get the most out of a victory is to follow it with another that makes it look small."

"There are many branches of learning, but only the one solid tree-trunk of wisdom."

"There is not an ounce of our former strength which is not doing some sort of job, right now."

"There never is any diminution of the vast majority, indifferent to what they are, whence they came, and whither they go, who rush from business to pastime, and from pastime back to business, leaving no vacancy into which the unknown might slip a little experimental greatness."

"Thought the fool is to be pitied, still he is spared watching spurious wisdom turn to ashes in his head."

"Thoughts left unsaid are never wasted."

"Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer."

"Tradition supplants inspiration with the warmed-over article."

"Twenty is in hot haste to become a year older and cast its first vote, which Forty will know was cast like the legendary pearls."

"Ugly facts are a challenge to beautify them."

"Vacant minds have their uses, yet it seems a pity to waste first-class bodies on them."

"We are no more alike under the skin than we are on top of it."

"We condemn a sin before we have even tried it."

"We fall short when we ascribe all the modes of happiness to walking in paths of rectitude. There are joys which only tramps and thieves know."

"We should train our desires to show the way to our dreams."

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are but tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"When a man?s success becomes commonplace to him, it is his success no longer."

"We demand about everything of ourselves but discrimination in what we demand."

"We cannot be too earnest, too persistent, too determined, about living superior to the herd instinct."

"When you start to indulge yourself, remember it is what they do with invalids and children."

"When a thing is not worth overdoing, leave it alone!"

"When study becomes labor, we had better change the subject-matter as quickly as possible."

"Where you find imagination tracing the outlines and reason filling in the details, there you have a man."

"When you think of the silly things people have said to you which have stopped you from saying the same silly things, you simply can?t do justice to your gratitude."

"Who can set us straight in our labyrinth from the mazes of his own?"