Great Throughts Treasury

"Give a thing time; if it can succeed it is a right thing. Look now at American Saxondom; and at that little fact of the sailing of the Mayflower two hundred years ago * * * ! Were we of open sense as the Greeks were, we had found a poem here; one of nature's own poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great continents. For it was properly the beginning of America. There were straggling settlers in America before, some material as if a body was there; but the soul of it was first this. * * * They thought the earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch there, too, overhead; they should be left in peace to prepare for eternity by living well in this world of time, worshiping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous, way. * * * Hah! these men, I think, had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong in one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then, but nobody can manage to laugh at it now."

"Give me a man who sings at his work."

"Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther."

"Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights."

"Graceful, ingenious, illuminative reading."

"Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?"

"Great is self-denial! Life goes all to ravels and tatters where that enters not."

"Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser."

"Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History."

"Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest."

"Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!"

"God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell."

"Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!"

"Happy the people whose annals are vacant."

"Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you."

"He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide."

"He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet."

"Hast thou hope? they asked of John Knox, when he lay a-dying. He spoke nothing, but raised his finger and pointed upward, and so died."

"Hast thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: the end of man is an action and not a thought, though it were of the noblest."

"He that can work is a born king of something."

"He walked into Judaea eighteen hundred years ago; His sphere melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men, and, being of a truth sphere melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousandfold accompaniments and rich symphonies, through all our hearts, and modulates and divinely leads them."

"He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever."

"He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years."

"He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing."

"He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything."

"He who has battled with poverty and hard toil will be found stronger and more expert than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the provision wagons, or unwatchfulty abiding by the stuff."

"He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech."

"Here numerous persons, with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down again"

"He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem."

"Here hath been dawning another blue day: think, wilt thou let it slip useless away?"

"Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men."

"Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them."

"High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge."

"His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps."

"Heroes have gone out, quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nine­teenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. One portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other."

"His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not succeed by being an easy religion. As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, — sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler."

"Heroism--the divine relation which in all times unites a great man to other men."

"His sparkling sallies bubbled up as from aereated natural fountains."

"History is a mighty drama, enacted upon, the theatre of time, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background."

"History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed."

"History is the essence of innumerable Biographies."

"Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul."

"History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion."

"How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil."

"How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?"

"How shall he give kindling in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder?"

"How much lies in laughter: the cipher key, wherewith we decipher the whole man!"

"How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?"

"How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man."

"Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius."