Great Throughts Treasury

"A voice in the wind I do not know; a meaning on the face of the high hills whose utterance I cannot comprehend. A something is behind them: that is God."

"Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings."

"Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them."

"Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk."

"After a few days, Willie got tired of [the water-wheel] — and no blame to him, for it was no earthly use beyond amusement, and that which can only amuse can never amuse long. I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colors into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?"

"Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill."

"Alas! how easily things go wrong! A sigh too deep or a kiss too long, and then comes a mist and a weeping rain, and life is never the same again."

"All wickedness tends to destroy individuality and declining natures assimilate as they sink."

"All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words."

"All that is not God is death."

"Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too long and there follows a mist and a weeping rain and life is never the same again"

"Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?"

"Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence."

"All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an inter-radiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied."

"All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come."

"All the morning he was busy… with his heart in trying to content himself beforehand with whatever fate the Lord might intend for him… The thing most disappointing to him he would treat as the will of God for him, and try to make up his mind to it, persuading himself it was the right and"

"All things were made through the Word, but that which was made in the Word was life, and that life is the light of men: they who live by this light, that is live as Jesus lived, by obedience, namely, to the Father, have a share in their own making; the light becomes life in them; they are, in their lower way, alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and through Him has been born in them-by obedience they become one with the Godhead: “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.”"

"And there thou mov’st in paths to us unknown. Out of strange strife thy peace is strangely wrought; If the lion in us pray-thou answerest the lamb."

"And so all growth that is not towards God Is growing to decay."

"And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay."

"Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration."

"Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil."

"And in thy own sermon, thou that the sparrow falls dost allow, it shall not cause me any alarm; for neither so comes the bird to harm, seeing our Father, thou hast said, is by the sparrow's dying bed; therefore it is a blessed place, and the sparrow in high grace."

"Am I going to do a good deed? Then, of all times- Father into thy hands: lest the enemy should have me now."

"An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald]"

"Anemone, so well named of the wind, to which thou art all free."

"And there is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything. . . . He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss."

"Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon."

"Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on."

"Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea."

"As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy."

"As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone -- which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart."

"As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book or a friend."

"As the world must be redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul is redeemed in a few of its thoughts, and works, and ways to begin with: it takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption."

"At the prayer of His mother, He made room in His plans for the thing she desired. It was not His wish then to work a miracle, but if His mother wished it, He would. He did for His mother what for His own part He would rather have left alone. Not always did He do as His mother would have Him; but this was a case in which He could do so, for it would interfere nowise with the will of His Father… The Son, then, could change His intent and spoil nothing: so, I say, can the Father; for the Son does nothing but what He sees the Father do."

"As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's. He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient."

"As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement."

"Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth. Upon the earth without a meet alloy."

"Attitudes are more important than facts."

"Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost. . . . Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one anymore. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight."

"Benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others."

"Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds."

"Bountiful Primroses, with outspread heart that needs the rough leaves' care."

"Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!"

"Better to have the poet's heart than brain, feeling than song."

"But does a man owe nothing to himself?-Nothing that I know of. I am under no obligation to myself. How can I divide myself and say that the one half of me is indebted to the other? To my mind, it is a mere fiction of speech.-But whence, then, should such a fiction arise?-From the dim sense of a real obligation, I suspect-the object of which is mistaken. I suspect it really springs from our relation to the unknown God, so vaguely felt that a false form is readily accepted for its embodiment. ."

"But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!"

"But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant! Not what he pleases, but what he can."

"But he remembered that even if she did box his ears, he musn't box hers again, for she was a girl, and all that boys must do, if girls are rude, is to go away and leave them."

"But first I said... "Some people think it is not proper for a clergyman to dance. I mean to assert my freedom from any such law. If our Lord chose to represent, in His parable of the Prodigal Son, the joy in Heaven over a repentant sinner by the figure of "music and dancing', I will hearken to Him rather than to man, be they as good as they may." For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them."