Great Throughts Treasury

"Any frontal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance."

"Life means progress, and progress means suffering."

"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."

"Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma."

"Great art... is the result of the labors of thousands of faithful craftsmen who know that they are doomed to remain forever outside the gates of the Paradise of Perfection, but who nevertheless will give the very best there is in them because the work they do means more to them than anything else in this world."

"For tolerance (and you must remember this when you grow older), is of very recent origin and even the people of our own so-called modern world are apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them very much."

"High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed."

"It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness."

"In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma."

"On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man."