Great Throughts Treasury

"The moment we turn the magic of the moment into a maxim, we have clouded the sky."

"The muffled syllables that Nature speaks fill us with deeper longing for her word; she hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, she makes a sweeter music than is heard."

"The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others."

"The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful."

"The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients"

"The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age."

"The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character."

"The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him."

"The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms."

"The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk."

"The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder."

"The pure spirit in us may safely cultivate universal sympathies; for it can have no grudge against anything and will be tender also to our accidental natural selves and our home world; but the man must remain loyal to himself and his traditions, or he will be morally a eunuch and a secret hater of all mankind."

"The Soul is the voice of the body's interests."

"The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed."

"The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication."

"The religion of the optimists is one long lazy lie."

"The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt."

"The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany. And the reason is not too far to seek. When there is philosophical orthodoxy, and speculation is expected to be a reasoned defense of some funded inspiration, it becomes itself corporate and traditional, and requires centres of teaching, endowment, and propaganda."

"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught."

"The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form."

"The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification."

"The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best-chosen word."

"The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."

"The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations."

"The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities and relations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity."

"The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings."

"The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves."

"The wisest man has something yet to learn."

"Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts."

"The worship of power is an old religion."

"The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity."

"There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books."

"There are three traps that strangle philosophy: the Church, the marriage-bed, and the professor's chair."

"There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place"

"There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far."

"There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors., but the relationship between them is unclear."

"There is no dilemma in the choice between animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith, and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds."

"There is no dunce like a mature dunce."

"There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he."

"There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself."

"There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves."

"There is no God and Mary is His Mother."

"There is no right government except good government."

"They say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone. The trouble then seems something fated, not to be questioned, like life itself; and nature is built to face it and to see it out."

"There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor."

"They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life."

"There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman."

"Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that."

"Thinking is a way of living, and the most vital way."

"Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather lie in reading and writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and better men, and enjoying life more."