Great Throughts Treasury

"In order to change, one must first assume responsibility: one must commit oneself to some action. The word "responsibility" itself denotes that capability: "response"+"ability" - that is the ability to respond." - Irvin David Yalom

"As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite - variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite - energy. It is not the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not." - John Ruskin

"The human mind is incredible. And, for that matter, so are the minds of all living creatures. God programmed a tiny spider, for instance, to weave a web. He programmed a salmon to swim thousands of miles upstream to the exact location where it was hatched. If the brains of spiders and salmon can be programmed to perform such feats, imagine what capability of the human brain can achieve. " - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash

"I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?" - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Goethe's thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other. Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

"Therefore, since it is certain that if compared with one another all good things are either equally or unequally good, it is necessary that all [good] things are good through something which is understood to be identical in [these] different goods—although at times, ostensibly, some things are said to be good through something else." - Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL

"The devil has his elect." - Thomas Carlyle

"Sure, he's not in hell; he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a finer end, and went away, an it had been any christom child; 'a parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o’ the tide: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields." - William Shakespeare

"In the background of conscious life there is a multitude of cogitations. This background is not a vagueness beyond the reaches of analysis, a sort of fog within consciousness; it is a field already differentiated. One can distinguish in it various types of acts: acts of belief (the dawning of a genuine belief, a belief that precedes knowledge etc.) of pleasure or displeasure, of desire, etc." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas