Great Throughts Treasury

"Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please and you can never have both."

"God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to reflection is the thinking of the mind."

"He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear."

"He is only rich who owns the day."

"Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks."

"Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself."

"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."

"He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little."

"He that would know hot to be always pleased, glad of success and glad of disappointment should accustom himself to reflect that every event of whatever complexion, increases his knowledge and in consequence his power."

"I am not mortified by our vice, but I own our virtue makes me ashamed."

"Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day."

"How casually and unobserved we make all our most valued acquaintances."

"I can find my biography in every fable that I read."

"His heart was as great as the world but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong."

"How much of human life is lost in waiting!"

"I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it."

"I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply."

"In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil."

"If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow."

"If you cannot be free, be as free as you can."

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession... Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much."

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion - it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself."

"Life is not so short that there is always time enough for courtesy."

"Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it."

"Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front."

"Make yourself necessary to somebody."

"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you."

"Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows."

"Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books."

"Men are what their mothers made them."

"Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment."

"Men lose their tempers in defending their taste."

"Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices."

"Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic."

"Morality is the object of government."

"Most of the great results in history are brought about by discreditable means."

"No great man over complains of want of opportunity."

"Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another's."

"No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back."

"Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life."

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world."

"Nothing is fair or good alone."

"Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great."

"Obedience alone gives the right to command."

"Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only; when we have come, by a divine leading [illness?] into the inner firmament, we are apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we esteem final."

"Our best thoughts come from others."