Great Throughts Treasury

"The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt."

"The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong."

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

"These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."

"They know enough who know how to learn."

"This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of religion. In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance, one necessarily fell upon the famous old bear that scared children at play; but, even had the animal shown more logic than its victim, one had learned from Socrates to distrust, above all other traps, the trap of logic -- the mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of thousands of educations had found their end. Generation after generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had ever found a logical highroad of escape."

"This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

"Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them."

"Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course."

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

"Time is bunk."

"To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity."

"Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."

"Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see."

"We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable"

"We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts."

"Whatever happens at all happens as it should; thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch closely."

"William Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language."

"Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral."

"Words were with them forms of expression which varied with individuals, but falsehood was more or less necessary to all"

"You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!"

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

"You say that love is nonsense - I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength."