Great Throughts Treasury

"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for."

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

"The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret. Great passions are for great souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine."

"The aim of love is to love: no more, and no less."

"The essence of romance is uncertainty."

"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated. "

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple."

"The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is."

"The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it."

"To be good is to be in harmony with oneself."

"The try mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

"Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it."

"We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little."

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

"To the claims of conformity, no man may yield and remain free."

"To be in love is to surpass oneself."

"We live in the age of the overworked and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid."

"A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than... by the occasional occurrence of crime."

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

"A live unexamined isn't worth living. I will add, a life unlived isn't worth examining."

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."

"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. "

"A good friend will always stab you in the front. "

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at."

"A visionary is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world."

"A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. "

"Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means."

"Action is the last refuge of those who cannot dream."

"Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization."

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his. "

"All great ideas are dangerous."

"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much. "

"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. "

"Ambition is the last refuge of failure."

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. "

"Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development."

"And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal."

"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success."

"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. "

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. "

"Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known. "

"As long as war is looked upon [regarded] as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked on as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."

"Bad artists always admire each other’s work."

"Be yourself, everyone else is already taken."

"At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. "

"Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation."