Great Throughts Treasury

"Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation."

"Time, with all its celerity, moves slowly on to him whose whole employment is to watch its flight."

"To a poet nothing can be useless."

"To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them; for they prove at least our power, and show that our favor is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood."

"To be happy at home is the ultimate aim of all ambition; the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."

"To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant and which is animated only by Faith and Hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example."

"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself."

"To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life."

"To do nothing is in every man’s power; we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties. The lapse to indolence is soft and imperceptible, because it is only a mere cessation of activity; but the return to diligence is difficult, because it implies a change from rest to motion, from privation to reality."

"To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed."

"To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence - an exemption granted only to invariable virtue."

"To hear complaints is wearisome to the wretched and the happy alike."

"To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship."

"To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them. All sorrow that lasts longer than its cause is morbid, and should be shaken off as an attack of melancholy, as the forerunner of a greater evil than poverty or pain."

"To embarrass justice by a multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, are the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage."

"To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life."

"To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly."

"To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage."

"To neglect, at any time, preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack."

"To love one that is great, is almost to be great one's self."

"To marry a second time represents the triumph of hope over experience."

"To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues."

"To purchase heaven has gold the power? can gold remove the mortal hour? in life can love be bought with gold? are friendship's pleasures to be sold? no - all that's worth a wish - a thought, fair virtue gives unbribed, unbought. Cease then on trash thy hopes to bind, let nobler views engage thy mind."

"To resist temptation once is not a sufficient proof of honesty. If a servant, indeed, were to resist the continued temptation of silver lying in a window, when he is sure his master does not know how much there is of it, he would give a strong proof of honesty. But this is a proof to which you have no right to put a man. You know there is a certain degree of temptation which will overcome any virtue. Now, in so far as you approach temptation to a man, you do him an injury; and, if he is overcome, you share his guilt."

"To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. - We can no longer be useful when not well."

"To shake with laughter ere the jest they hear, To pour at will the counterfeited tear; And, as their patron hints the cold or heat, To shake in dog-days, in December sweat."

"To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which if not a virtue, is the groundwork of a virtue."

"To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity."

"To tell our own secrets is generally folly, but that folly is without guilt; to communicate those with which we are intrusted is always treachery, and treachery for the most part combined with folly."

"Truth has no gradations; nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true."

"Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. - Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. - But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. - So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction."

"Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties."

"Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use."

"Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle."

"Truth, Sir, is a cow, which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."

"Truth, like beauty, varies in its fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literature of his own age."

"Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate; and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own."

"Virtue is too often merely local."

"Want of tenderness is want of parts, and is no less a proof of stupidity than depravity."

"We all live in the hope of pleasing somebody; and the pleasure of pleasing ought to be greatest, and always will be greatest, when our endeavors are exerted in consequence of our duty."

"Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste on the other, by which, on the same income, another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how."

"We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself."

"We are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself."

"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us."

"We are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction."

"We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember."

"We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice."

"We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over."

"We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind."

"We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves."