Great Throughts Treasury

"That is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of what you consider in itself unbelievable."

"That no obedience but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my heart and strength; but that there is none else that He cares for, is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?"

"The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop."

"That’s a poet. I thought you said it was a boat. Stupid pet! Don’t you know what a poet it? Why, a thing to sail on the water in. Well, perhaps you’re not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea... A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too."

"That no keeping but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my heart and strength; but that there is none else He cares for, is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son!"

"That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event."

"The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself."

"The bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those-few at any moment on the earth-who do not “look before and after, and pine for what is not” but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now."

"The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you -that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life. “No; mine is a reasonable care- an unavoidable care, indeed.” Is it something you have to do this very moment? “No.” Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you this moment. “There is nothing required of me at this moment.” Nay but there is-the greatest thing that can be required of man. “Pray, what is it?” Trust in the living God…. “I do trust Him in spiritual matters.” Everything is an affair of the spirit."

"The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken."

"The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born."

"The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love."

"The direct foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero, and more."

"The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it."

"The Father said, ‘That is a stone’. The Son would not say, ‘That is a loaf’. No one creative Fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before... There was in these miracles, and I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us. He makes it… Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous. Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once- immediately-than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield."

"The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law-a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty."

"The final end of the separation is not individuality; that is but a means to it: the final end is oneness-an impossibility without it. For there can be no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where there is but one. Two at least are needed for oneness."

"The fire of God, which is His essential being, His love, His creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at a distance it burns-that the further from Him, it burns the worse."

"The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission."

"The former are content to have the light cast upon their way: the latter will have it in their eyes and cannot; if they had, it would blind them. For them to know more would be their worse condemnation. They are not fit to know more, more shall not be given them yet…. “You choose the dark; you shall stay in the dark till the terrors that dwell in the dark affray you, and cause you to cry out.” God puts a seal upon the will of man; that seal is either His great punishment or His mighty favor: “Ye love the darkness, abide in the darkness”: “O woman great is thy faith: be it done unto thee even as thou wilt!”"

"The heart of man cannot hoard. His brain or his hand may gather into its box and hoard, but the moment the thing has passed into the box, the heart has lost it and is hungry again. If a man would have, it is the Giver he must have; . .. Therefore all that He makes must be free to come and go through the heart of His child; he can enjoy it only as it passes, can enjoy only its life, its soul, its vision, its meaning, not itself."

"The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended."

"The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the “Come, thou blessed,” spoken to the individual. . . . The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol -his soul’s picture, in a word-the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is. … It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for than first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God’s name for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in His thought when he began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success-to say “In thee also I am well pleased.”"

"The hell that a lie would keep a man from, is doubtless the very best place for him to go."

"The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it."

"The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be driven to the source of life and law-of their life and His law-to seek from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary."

"The house is not for me-it is for Him."

"The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home"

"The man who grounds his action on another's cowardice, is essentially a coward himself."

"The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt, in that fear doubteth thee."

"The liberty of the God who would have his creatures free, is in contest with the slavery of the creature who would cut his own stem from his root that he might call it his own and love it; who rejoices in his own consciousness, instead of the life of that consciousness; who poises himself on the tottering wall of his own being, instead of the rock on which that being is built. Such a one regards his own dominion over himself- the rule of the greater by the less-as a freedom infinitely larger than the range of the universe of God’s being. If he says, “At least I have it in my own way!”, I answer, you do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your heart; now from the greed of lawlessness of some ancestor you would be ashamed of if you knew him; or, it may be, now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it."

"The kingdom of heaven is not come even when God's will is our law; it is fully come when God's will is our will."

"The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom."

"The name is one “which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship Him."

"The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes."

"The number of fools not yet acknowledging the first condition of manhood nowise alters the fact that he who has begun to recognize duty and acknowledge the facts of his being, is but a tottering child on the path of life. He is on the path: he is as wise as at the time he can be; the Father’s arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not therefore a wonderful being; not therefore a model of wisdom; not at all the admirable creature his largely remaining folly would, in his worst moments (that is, when he feels best) persuade him to think himself; he is just one of God’s poor creatures."

"The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God."

"The one principle of hell is-”I am my own!”"

"The notion of suffering as an offset for sin, the foolish idea that a man by suffering borne may get out from under the hostile claim to which his wrong-doing has subjected him, comes first of all, I think, from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. Why do we feel this satisfaction? Because we hate wrong, but, not being righteous ourselves, more or less hate the wronger as well as his wrong, hence are not only righteously pleased to behold the law's disapproval proclaimed in his punishment, but unrighteously pleased with his suffering, because of the impact upon us of his wrong. In this way the inborn justice of our nature passes over to evil. It is no pleasure to God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked suffer. To regard any suffering with satisfaction, save it be sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil, is inhuman because undivine, is a thing God is incapable of. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is so altogether alien to wrong, because it is to him a heart-pain and trouble that one of his little ones should do the evil thing, there is, I believe, no extreme of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying the evil thing in them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God; that love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing."

"The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye."

"The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. The advantage gained by the carpenter of Nazareth at his bench is the inheritance of every workman as he imitates his maker in the divine - that is, honest - work."

"The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defeats, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, "Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my home". Such a faith will not lead to presumption. The man who can pray such a prayer will know better than another that God is not mocked; that He is not a man that He should repent; that tears and entreaties will not work on Him to the breach of one of His laws; that for God to give a man, because he asked for it, that which was not in harmony with His laws of truth and right, would be to damn him -- to cast him into the outer darkness."

"The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work."

"The pure eye for the true vision of another's claims can only go with the loving heart. The man who hates can hardly be delicate in doing Justice, say to his neighbor's love, to his neighbor's predilections and peculiarities. It is hard enough to be just to our friends; and how shall our enemies fare with us?"

"The road is difficult. - But come; loss now will be gain then! To wait is harder than to run, and its meed is the fuller."

"The response to self-existent love is self-abnegating love. The refusal of Himself is that in Jesus which corresponds to the creation in God... When he died on the cross, He did that, in the wild weather of His outlying provinces, in the torture of the body of His revelation, which He had done at home in glory and gladness."

"The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human soul."

"The regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence."

"The Root of All Rebellion: It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine"

"The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence."