Great Throughts Treasury

"If Paris that brief flight allow, my humble tomb explore! It bears: "Eternity, be thou My refuge!" and no more."

"If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known."

"If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the word ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life ? to the question, How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayam's words: Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque. Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life."

"If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers."

"Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class."

"In the moonlight the shepherds, soft lull'd by the rills, lie wrapt in their blankets asleep on the hills."

"Is it so small a thing to have enjoy?d the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done; to have advanc?d true friends, and beat down baffling foes?"

"In his poetry as well as in his life Shelley was indeed 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel', beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

"Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?"

"It always seems to me that the right sphere for Shelley's genius was the sphere of music, not of poetry."

"It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think."

"It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence."

"It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely--nourished, and not bound by them."

"It is ? last stage of all ? when we are frozen up within, and quite the phantom of ourselves, to hear the world applaud the hollow ghost which blamed the living man."

"It is matter of the commonest remark how a timid man who is in love will show courage, or an indolent man will show diligence."

"It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached on an angle."

"It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life - to the question: How to live."

"It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done."

"Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave."

"Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese. Let them have it how they will! Thou art tired; best be still."

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

"Let the victors, when they come, when the forts of folly fall, find thy body by the wall."

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."

"Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, and in that more lie all his hopes of good."

"Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled."

"Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again."

"Men of culture are the true apostles of equality."

"Listen! you hear the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, at their return, up the high strand, begin, and cease, and then again begin, with tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of sadness in."

"Miracles do not happen."

"Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power."

"Nature, with equal mind, sees all her sons at play sees man control the wind, the wind sweep man away."

"Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself."

"Nature's great law, and law of all men's minds?-- To its own impulse every creature stirs; Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!"

"No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his bible."

"No, no thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; 'tis that repeated shocks, again, again, exhaust the energy of strongest souls and numb the elastic powers."

"Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it"

"No, no! The energy of life may be kept on after the grave, but not begun; and he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, from strength to strength advancing--only he his soul well-knit, and all his battles won, mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life."

"No, thou art come too late, Empedocles! And the world hath the day, and must break thee, not thou the world. With men thou canst not live, their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine; and being lonely thou art miserable, for something has impair'd they spirit's strength, and dried its self-sufficing font of joy."

"Not deep the poet sees, but wide."

"Nor bring, to see me cease to live, some doctor full of phrase and fame, to shake his sapient head, and give the ill he cannot cure a name."

"Not here, o Apollo! Are haunts meat for thee. But, where helicon breaks down in cliff to the sea."

"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."

"O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, and life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; before this strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims, its heads o?ertax?d, its palsied hearts, was rife."

"Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world."

"Odin, thou whirlwind, what a threat is this Thou threatenest what transcends thy might, even thine, For of all powers the mightiest far art thou, Lord over men on earth, and Gods in Heaven; Yet even from thee thyself hath been withheld One thing--to undo what thou thyself hast ruled."

"O strong soul, by what shore tarriest thou now? For that force, surely, has not been left vain!"

"O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope, of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives, and each half lives a hundred different lives; who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope."

"On one she smiled, and he was blest; She smiles elsewhere--we make a din! But 'twas not love which heaved her breast, Fair child!--it was the bliss within."

"Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavor, in all branches of knowledge?theology, philosophy, history, art, science?to see the object as in itself it really is."

"On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence."