Great Throughts Treasury

"Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn."

"Its body brevity, and wit its soul."

"Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud ? we in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colors a suffusion from that light."

"Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello."

"I've lived and loved."

"Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests."

"Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment."

"Lago's soliloquy--the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity--how awful it is!"

"Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford."

"Lay down in her loveliness."

"Life is thorny; and youth is vain; and to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain"

"Life, as Life, supposes a positive or universal principle in Nature, with a negative principle in every particular animal, the latter, or limitative power, constantly acting to individualize, and, as it were, figure the former. Thus, then, Life itself is not a thing?a self-subsistent hypostasis?but an act and process; which, pitiable as the prejudice will appear to the forts esprits, is a great deal more than either my reason would authorise or my conscience allow me to assert."

"Life went a-Maying With Nature, Hope, and Poesy; When I was young! When I was young? ? Ah, woful when!"

"Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been."

"Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means."

"Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread."

"Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree"

"Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead."

"Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action."

"Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action."

"Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether."

"Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare."

"Manly energy? is the proper rendering [for à?îç??], and not virtue, at least in the present and ordinary acceptation of the word."

"Metaphysics, ? the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being."

"Metaphisics is a word that you, my dear Sir! are no great friend to but yet you will agree, that a great Poet must be, implicitŠ if not explicitŠ, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain and Tongue; but he must have it by Tact for all sounds, and all forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest ? ; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child."

"Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value."

"Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind."

"Method means primarily a way or path of transit. From this we are to understand that the first idea of method is a progressive transition from one step to another in any course. If in the right course, it will be the true method; if in the wrong, we cannot hope to progress."

"Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven."

"Moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant, that in nine cases out of ten it acts as a narcotic. The blow that should rouse, stuns me."

"Motionless torrents! Silent cataracts!"

"Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth."

"Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind."

"Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake."

"My eyes make pictures, when they are shut."

"My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties."

"My next shall be a more sober and chastised Epistle ? but you see I was in the humor for metaphors ? and to tell thee the Truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my Inclination, that I do not chuse to contradict it for Trifles."

"My mind is in a state of philosophical doubt."

"My Opinion is this?that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton's works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind... that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare [sic] or a Milton... Mind in his system is always passive?a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God's Image, and that too in the sublimest sense?the image of the Creator?there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system."

"Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all one life."

"Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too ? transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portait of Yesterday."

"Negatively, there may be more of the philosophy of Socrates in the?Memorabilia of Xenophon than in Plato: that is, there is less of what does?not belong to Socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by, ?Plato, are more Socratic."

"Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a life of it's own, and that we are all one Life."

"Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word (by whom light as well as immortality was brought into the world) which did not expand the intellect, while it purified the heart ? which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions."

"Never pursue literature as a trade."

"No man does anything from a single motive."

"No mind is thoroughly well-organized that is deficient in a sense of humor."

"No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart."

"Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist."

"Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."