Great Throughts Treasury

"No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give."

"On this subject it is striking to note how many individuals pursue, outside of their own professions and with a kind of rebellious delight, hobbies that are no more than personalized forms of work. This suggests that one of the hidden desires of humanity, provoked by the inward clamor of unused potentialities, is the dream of work in freedom."

"One way of thinking about time?s dimensionality is through comparisons like that between a pebble (small spatially but large temporally) and a cloud (large spatially but small temporally). With this concept in mind, we may look at a more difficult issue: the comparative spatial and temporal dimensionality of human experience. We may compare, for example, the human being with the dimensions of the space-time continuum itself. By current reckoning, the universe has a radius of 20 billion light-years (a light-year is about 6 trillion miles) and consequently a known age of 20 billion years. Divide your approximate height into the radius of the universe. Then divide your age into the age of the universe. No matter what your height and age, you will find that you are immensely larger in time than you are in space. If your size in time were as small as your size in space, you would live less than one-millionth of a second. If your size in space were as large as your size in time, you would need a microscope to examine the solar system. Pygmies in space, we are bumbling giants in time."

"Our blindness to time is particularly severe with regard to its middle distances, its weeks and months... In order to reassert control over these mechanisms, we must first become aware of them. But they are difficult to evaluate in isolation... not to pick nits bur rather to consult broader purposes, taking time off every few days to review our position in life, evaluating the present in terms of past and future, memories and plans, and determining the ways in which recent and present choices may suggest larger patterns. In so doing, we rise temporarily above the ordinary flow of time and reacquaint ourselves with the larger pattern of forces which is our enduring identity."

"People instinctively regard their good luck as something they have deserved and their bad luck as something they have not. In so doing they misconceive the nature of luck and run afoul of it. Luck has nothing at all to do with the past. It is a whisper from the future, to be enjoyed only by those who cherish the futurity within themselves."

"Philosophy has been out of gas for some time now. In fact, it's better to call it fossilophy. If it ever reemerges in lively form, I imagine it may be as some means of reorganizing or redefining other areas of inquiry."

"Philosophy, as honestly practiced, concerns the two inseparable questions of how to think and how to act. Thus philosophy must be both theoretical and pragmatic."

"Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to."

"Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space."

"Since philosophy necessarily concerns the distinction between truth and lie, it must concern itself with the issue of what is shallow and what isn't. However, it does not rightly concern itself with "ultimate answers." Indeed, little is more shallow that what we call "ultimate.""

"Successful people generally have more errors to their credit, and often bigger ones, than unsuccessful people. They view these in the same way that scientists view failed experiments: not as moral setbacks but as the necessary concomitants of discovery. While plodders see failure as a demon, achievers see it more as a void, oppressive perhaps but not intimidating, and capable of redemption by the first success that comes along. They know, however, that success, no matter how much praised or how well rewarded, will open up new challenges, new risks of failure."

"Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture."

"Temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms."

"That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us."

"The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time... Deprived of the continuum, we lose not only the sole valid alternative to a present-centered existence but also the nourishing contest which can give substance and value to the present itself."

"The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs."

"The future is like a friendly stranger, polite and patient, forever trying to get acquainted with us, forever being rebuffed. If we did simple exercises for thirty minutes a day, we would greatly improve our strength, health, beauty, and life expectancy. If we studied for one hour a day, we could relatively soon learn languages, master wide knowledge, and develop new professions. If we sensibly invested $1 a day, we would in thirty years control substantial wealth. If we did ourselves the almost absurdly simple honor of planning our free time, we would enlarge ourselves into a whole new dimension of freedom. Yet we often fail to do any of these things, so great is our contempt of the future, so massive our ignorance of ourselves. It would be for most of us a highly disagreeable experience to meet, in the flesh, our future selves. Not just for the visual shock of seeing our own spirits animating bent limbs, watery eyes, and sagging jowls; but for the moral shock of meeting individuals whom we have daily and disgracefully wronged."

"The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel."

"The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves."

"The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest."

"The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention."

"The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place."

"The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the achievements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination."

"The years forget our errors and forgive our sins, but they punish our inaction with living death."

"Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward."

"Time is everywhere, yet eludes us. Time is so bound up in our universe and ourselves that it resists our efforts to isolate and define it. Time haunts our experience like some invisible spirit of things, some irretrievable truth. And when we try to manage our own time, setting new goals, cleaning and rearranging the little houses of our days, time gently mocks us?not so much because we lack wit as because time operates on a deeper psychological level than conscious effort can normally reach."

"Time is one of the few basic variables of all our measurement. That is why the rise of modern science and technology depended, to a large extent, on the precise measurement of time. The other, more figurative and personal definitions of time all grow out of this."

"To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the ?in? box and the ?out? box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free future, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past - maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings."

"True intimacy is a human constant. People of all types find it equally hard to achieve, equally precious to hold. Age, education, social status, make little difference here; even genius does not presuppose the talent to reveal one's self completely and completely absorb one's self in another personality. Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together to attention and release of energy."

"True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love."

"Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer."

"Two quick and easy ways of growing old are (1) to resist change obstinately and (2) to worship it abjectly... Those who remain fresh and vital, as though they floated in time, are people who understand permanence as a balance of dynamics rather than a constitution of detail, who retain the youthful mechanism of converting change into growth."

"We are not great connoisseurs of the two twilights. We miss the dawning, exclusably enough, by sleeping through it, and are as much strangers to the shadowless welling-up of day as to the hesitant return of consciousness in our slowly waking selves. But our obliviousness to evening twilight is less understandable. Why do we almost daily ignore a spectacle (and I do not mean sunset but rather the hour, more or less, afterward) that has a thousand tonalities, that alters and extends reality, that offers, more beautifully than anything man-made, a visual metaphor or peace? To say that it catches us at busy or tired moments won't do; for in temperate latitudes it varies by hours from solstice to solstice. Instead I suspect that we shun twilight because if offers two things which, as insecurely rational beings, we would rather not appreciate: the vision of irrevocable cosmic change (indeed, change into darkness), and a sense of deep ambiguity?of objects seeming to be more, less, other than we think them to be. We are noontime and midnight people, and such devoted camp-followers of certainly that we cannot endure seeing it mocked and undermined by nature. There is a brief period of twilight of which I am especially fond, little more than a moment, when I see what seems to be color without light, followed by another brief period of light without color. The earlier period, like a dawn of night, calls up such sights as at all other times are hidden, wistful half-formless presences neither of day nor night, that draw up with them similar presences in the mind."

"We are wistful about the golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress."

"We commonly conceive of time as something external to ourselves. Modern physics has established time and space as parts of the same continuum and thus by implication integrated time into the heart of all things perceived; but modern language, common sense, and humanistic inquiry lag far behind. We still speak and think in clich‚s which suggest that time is outside of us, something which ?passes,? something we can ?spend,? ?serve,? or ?kill?; something which, though admittedly a part of the natural order, runs a course of its own. While natural science has attained a temporal understanding which is not only realistic but strangely beautiful and evocative, our own more general awareness of time has changed little since the days when Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition. Our world of time is as flat and exclusive as some medieval map."

"We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives."

"We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs."

"We starve, neglect, insult, and variously abuse our memories, treating them more like filing cabinets, to store and regurgitate the minor data we need from day to day, than like living and creative elements of identity. We blink dumbly at the other powers of memory?its haunting retentiveness, its impish selectivity, its ability to barrage us with unnecessary information or to desert us completely in hours of need, its profound intercourse with the unconscious?without trying to comprehend or benefit from these functions. This uneasy relationship with a rich and voluminous intellectual resource is a sign of our distance from ourselves, and more particularly of our failure to recognize our own extensions in time. Our memories take their revenge for this lack of respect and cultivation with slowdowns, walkouts, bitter satires, and outrageous midnight rallies."

"We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day."

"What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind."

"Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook."

"You may cure yourself of a depression by forcing yourself to perform, in rapid order and with excruciating concentration, half a dozen or so unpleasant chores, especially if they have long been postponed. This is a kind of homeopathic purgative, a treatment of like with like."