Great Throughts Treasury

"To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career."

"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired."

"Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow and be not happy like a naked star, yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, some rapture from the rapture felt afar."

"To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."

"To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world."

"To be happy, even to conceive happiness, you must be reasonable or (if Nietzsche prefers the word) you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy you must be wise."

"To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time."

"To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life regardless of its contents."

"To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried."

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."

"Two mistakes seem to me to inhere in moralism: one, that God cannot be good or worthy of worship unless he obeys the precepts of human morality; the other, that if God is not good after our fashion, our own morality is undermined."

"We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on."

"To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography."

"To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say."

"To know your future you must know your past."

"To reform means to shatter one form and to create another, but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful."

"To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well."

"Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun."

"Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, "Please strike here!""

"Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards."

"What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word, the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water."

"Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"Wealth, religion and military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth."

"We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?"

"What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak."

"What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence in the moral intelligibility of things."

"We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

"Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway."

"What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detached from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are."

"What is more important in life than our bodies, or in the world than what we look like?"

"What would you ask of philosophy? To feed you on sweets and lull you in your errors in hope that death may overtake you before you understand anything? Ah, wisdom is sharper than death and only the brave can love her."

"When a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them."

"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art."

"When omniscience was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness of human thought may console us for its imperfection."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out."

"Why should not things be largely absurd, futile and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and we and they go very well together."

"When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country."

"When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?"

"Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope."

"Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt."

"Work and love -- these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled."

"You cannot prove realism to a complete skeptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete skeptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfill the assumptions of his life and not destroy him."

"Wisdom is an evanescent madness, when the dream still continues but no longer deceives."

"Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy."