Great Throughts Treasury

"All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography."

"All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains."

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."

"All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one."

"All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle."

"All men are poets at heart."

"All necessary truth is its own evidence."

"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands."

"All mankind love a lover."

"All nobility in its beginnings was somebody’s natural superiority."

"All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end. though you can render no reason."

"All successful men have agreed in one thing - they were caustionists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things."

"All the elements, whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become his masters."

"All things are engaged in writing their history... Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent."

"All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power."

"And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship."

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."

"Beside the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit."

"Besides why should we be cowed by the name of Action? "Tis a trick of the senses, -- no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a thought. To think is to act."

"Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil for him his proper work."

"Art is the path of the creator to his work."

"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man... and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet."

"Art is a jealous mistress."

"As soon as there is life there is danger."

"As we are, so we do; and as we do, so it is done to us."

"As we grow old... the beauty steals inward."

"Blame is safer than praise."

"Body cannot teach wisdom; God only."

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religions, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chair by imitation."

"Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function, living is the functionary."

"Conformity is the ape of harmony."

"Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors."

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. The very hope of man. The thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization."

"Children are aliens and we treat them as such."

"Concentration is the secret of strength."

"Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself."

"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol."

"Do what you know and perception is converted into character."

"Every man contemplates an angel in his future self."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble."

"Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain."

"Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer."

"Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principle reason why men are so often useless is, that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits."

"Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is truck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many; new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon."

"Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time."

"Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances."

"Every opinion reacts on him who utters it."

"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."