Great Throughts Treasury

"Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? I am a Public Preacher; appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly a sign to you, if your eyes were open!"

"Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune."

"Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for"

"Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature."

"Man is a tool using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all."

"Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free."

"Man's Unhappiness... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is... the Shadow of Ourselves."

"Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable."

"May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books."

"Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got one."

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels. In fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite."

"Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against."

"Many diseases may be cured by abstinence."

"Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind."

"Midas longed for gold. He got gold, so that whatever he touched became gold; and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it."

"Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go."

"Money will buy money's worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?"

"Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther."

"Money, which is of very uncertain value, and sometimes has no value at all and even less."

"Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid."

"Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish."

"Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men."

"My books are friends that never fail me."

"Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets."

"Necessity dispenseth with decorum."

"Nature admits no lie."

"Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?"

"My whinstone house my castle is, I have my own four walls."

"No age seemed the age of romance to itself."

"No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor."

"No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."

"No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors."

"No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment."

"No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!"

"No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects."

"No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; — living in a vain show. Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death."

"No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes."

"No magic Rune acting is wonderful as a book. Books are the exquisite property of men."

"No man is born without ambitious worldly desires."

"No man sees far, the most see no farther than their noses."

"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense."

"No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy."

"No pressure, no diamonds"

"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men."

"No person is important enough to make me angry."

"No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself."

"Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world."

"No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves."

"Not all his men may sever this, it yields to friends', not monarchs', calls; my whinstone house my castle is— I have my own four walls."

"None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone."