Great Throughts Treasury

"Everybody is a bit right; nobody is completely right or completely wrong. The prevalence of this point of view among all decent people nearly always has the same dreadful result for, according to their doctrine, every time a contemporary is quite right, he must be crucified. They can never forgive him because he denies their dogma; worst still, he reveals that they hold another dogma which they conceal."

"What is a miracle? The natural law of a unique event."

"Every abstract thinker tears love and time asunder."

"He who believes in nothing still needs a girl to believe in him."

"Love decentralizes, truth universalizes: he who speaks addresses all mankind, he who loves incarnates all mankind in himself."

"Humanity has always conquered the flux of natural time by means of a rhythm between active and passive time-spans. To reconquer his holidays, to establish a new and better time schedule for life, has been the great endeavour of man ever since the days of Noah."

"To a mankind that recognizes the equality of man everywhere, every war becomes a civil war."

"On the Russian revolutionaries: To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, makes for a league of more practical proof than any religious order."

"He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run."

"And the great question for mankind is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever and old love or fear has lost its hold."

"We are so dull that we rarely realize how much history lies hidden in marriage, and how the one word spoken by the bride makes all the difference between cattle-raising and a nation's good breeding."