Great Throughts Treasury

"Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ?tis no foot of unfamiliar men, tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then."

"As our actual present world ... shows itself more clearly?our world of an aristocracy materialised and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal?we shall turn our eyes again, and to more purpose, upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope."

"Art still has truth. Take refuge there."

"And we forget because we must."

"Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur."

"Below the surface stream, shallow and light, of what we say and feel ? below the stream, as light, of what we think we feel, there flows with noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, the central stream of what we feel indeed."

"Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair."

"But be his my special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, from first youth tested up to extreme old age, business could not make dull, nor passion wild; who saw life steadily, and saw it whole."

"Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought."

"But each day brings from its pretty dust our soon choked souls to fill."

"But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns."

"But often, in the world?s most crowded streets, but often, in the din of strife, there rises an unspeakable desire after the knowledge of our buried life; a thirst to spend our fire and restless force in tracking out our true, original course; a longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beats so wild, so deep in us?to know whence our lives come and where they go."

"But the idea of science and systematic knowledge is wanting to our whole instruction alike, and not only to that of our business class ... In nothing do England and the Continent at the present moment more strikingly differ than in the prominence which is now given to the idea of science there, and the neglect in which this idea still lies here; a neglect so great that we hardly even know the use of the word science in its strict sense, and only employ it in a secondary and incorrect sense."

"But each day brings its petty dust our soon - chok?d souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will."

"But, where the road runs near the stream, oft through the trees they catch a glance of passing troops in the sun's beam? pennon, and plume, and flashing lance! Forth to the world those soldiers fare, to life, to cities, and to war!"

"But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims. A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history, the poet is told, is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry."

"But?if you cannot give us ease? last of the race of them who grieve here leave us to die out with these last of the people who believe! Silent, while years engrave the brow; silent?the best are silent now."

"Calm soul of all things! make it mine to feel, amid the city?s jar, that there abides a peace of thine, man did not make, and cannot mar."

"But the majestic river floated on, out of the mist and hum of that low land, into the frosty starlight, and there moved, rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste, under the solitary moon."

"Children dear, was it yesterday (call yet once) that she went away?"

"Children of men! The unseen power, whose eye forever doth accompany mankind, hath look'd on no religion scornfully that men did ever find."

"Coldly, sadly descends the autumn evening. The Field strewn with its dank yellow drifts of wither?d leaves, and the elms, fade into dimness apace, silent;?hardly a shout from a few boys late at their play!"

"Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, when the forts of folly fall, find thy body by the wall!"

"Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium."

"Come away, away children; come children, come down! The hoarse wind blows coldly; lights shine in the town."

"Creep into thy narrow bed, creep, and let no more be said!"

"Critical power... tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail."

"Come, dear children, let us away; down and away below! Now my brothers call from the bay, now the great winds shoreward blow, now the salt tides seaward flow; now the wild white horses play, champ and chafe and toss in the spray."

"Come to me in my dreams, and then by day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay the hopeless longing of the day."

"Criticism is a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

"Culture is a study of perfection."

"Culture is "to know the best that has been said and thought In the world.""

"Cruel, but composed and bland, dumb, inscrutable and grand, so Tiberius might have sat, had Tiberius been a cat."

"Culture is the endeavor to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind."

"Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

"Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail."

"Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

"Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light."

"Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of the physician."

"Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world."

"Each year we see breeds new beginnings, disappointments new."

"Culture is... Properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

"Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances."

"Eternal passion! Eternal pain!"

"English civilization - the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society-that is what interests me."

"Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, by contemplation of diviner things."

"Every time the words contrition or humility drop from the lips of a prophet or psalmist, Christianity appears."

"Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves."

"Eutrapelia. A happy and gracious flexibility, Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners."

"Experience - making all futures, fruits of all the pasts."