Great Throughts Treasury

"A clash of doctrines is not a disaster – it is an opportunity."

"A philosopher of imposing stature doesn’t think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or what is not known in the time when he lives."

"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay."

"A structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process."

"Creeds are at once the outcome of speculation and efforts to curb speculation."

"Beyond the logic concerned with things, education must provide the possibility of awakening and cultivating moral aesthetic intuitions. It is the neglect of these higher values that has reduced life to a mere struggle for existence and to the detriment of social and human values in economic and political life."

"Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning."

"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge."

"Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He inspires. The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."

"Each individual activity is nothing but the mode in which the general activity is individualized by the imposed conditions."

"Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies: we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies."

"God is the binding element in the world. The consciousness which is individual in us is universal to Him: the love which is partial in us is all-embracing in Him."

"Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up."

"It is the duty of the future to be dangerous."

"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains."

"Peace is self-control at its widest - at the width where the “self” has been lost, and the interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality."

"Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life."

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."

"Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development."

"Religion is the vision of something that stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehensions, something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."

"The concept of “God” is the way in which we understand this incredible fact – that what cannot be, yet is."

"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness."

"The deepest definition of youth is, life as yet untouched by tragedy."

"The future is big with every possibility of achievement and of tragedy."

"The kingdom of heaven is not the isolation of good from evil. It is the overcoming of evil by good. God has in his nature the knowledge of evil, of pain, and of degradation, but it is there as overcome with what is good."

"The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes."

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. . . . Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

"The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used."

"The resource to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals."

"The universe construed solely in terms of efficient causation of purely physical interconnections, presents a sheer, insoluble contradiction."

"The task of democracy is to relive mass misery and yet preserve the freedom of the individual."

"The secret of success [in education] is pace, and the secret of pace is concentration. But, in respect to precise knowledge, the watchwords is pace, pace, pace. Get your knowledge quickly, and then use it. If you can use it, you will retain it."

"The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable."

"The Western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations. Also the assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or aesthetic beauty…"

"There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what is does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of being. It is this assumption that I call scientific materialism. Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situations at which we have now arrived."

"When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them."

"The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."

"There is a unity of the body with the environment, as well as a unity of the body and soul into one person."

"Your character is developed according to your faith. This is the primary religious truth from which no one can escape."

"Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."

"Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination."

"Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose."

"Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe."

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge."

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order."

"Once learning is solidified, all is over with it."

"Religion will not gain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science."

"The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization."

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them."