Great Throughts Treasury

"Not till the fire is dying in the grate, look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, and the great price we paid for it full worth: we have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!"

"On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose, tired of his dark dominion, swung the fiend above the rolling ball in cloud part screened."

"Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within."

"Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity."

"Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks."

"She heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer. She had to cease to pray."

"Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive leap off the rim of earth across the dome. it is a night to make the heavens our home. More than the nest whereto apace we strive. lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, in swarms outrushing from the golden comb. They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: you throb in me, the dead revive. Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, life glistens on the river of death. it folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs of radiance, the radiance enrings: and this is the soul's haven to have felt."

"Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done."

"Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end."

"Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy;"

"She poured a little social sewage into his ears."

"She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!"

"That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!"

"Sweet as Eden is the air, and Eden-sweet the ray."

"Swift doth young Love flee, and we stand wakened, shivering from our dream."

"The man or country that fights priest-craft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere"

"The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong."

"The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures."

"The pine-tree drops its dead; they are quiet, as under the sea."

"The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts."

"The Topic over intellectual deeps in buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost. With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball: it is in truth a most contagious game: hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name."

"Thus piteously Love closed what he begat: the union of this ever-diverse pair! These two were rapid falcons in a snare, condemned to do the flitting of the bat."

"The well of true wit is truth itself"

"We never know what’s in us till we stand by ourselves."

"What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature."

"What are we first? First, animals; and next intelligences at a leap; on whom pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb."

"When others pick it up, becomes a gem!"

"'Tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too."

"Turning to gold all it touches and tries?"

"We are betrayed by what is false within"

"Under yonder beech-tree single on the greensward, couched with her arms behind her golden head, knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly, lies my young love sleeping in the shade."