Great Throughts Treasury

"To wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immortality."

"Freedom means chance; you are free, because there is no reason which will account for your particular acts, because no one in the world, not even yourself, can possibly say what you will, or will not, do next. You are ‘accountable’, in short, because you are a wholly ‘unaccountable’ creature."

"The soul’s immutable core - if there is one - can hardly be amiable. And to love any one for himself perhaps in the end becomes unmeaning."

"Our pleasure in any one who is in some way resembles those we love should warn us that love is in its essence not individual."

"If you identify the Absolute with God, that is not the God of religion. If again you separate them, God become s finite factor in the Whole. And the effort of religion is put an end to, and break down, this relation - a relation which, none the less, it essentially presupposes. Hence, short of the Absolute, God cannot rest, and having reached that goal, he is lost and religion with him."

"Our principle, that the abstract is the unreal, moves us steadily upward. It forces us first to rejection of bare primary qualities, and it compels us in the end to credit Nature with our higher emotions. That process can cease only where Nature is quite absorbed into spirit, and at ever stage of the process we find increase in reality."

"We find that the essence of human society consists in a common self, a life and will, which belong to and are exercised by the society as such, or by the individuals in society as such; it makes no difference which expression we choose. The reality of this common self, in the action of the political whole, receives the name of the ‘general will’."

"Nothing gives such force in getting rid of evil as this belief that the good is the only reality."