Great Throughts Treasury

"Violent excess is sure to provoke violent reaction; and the worst possible policy for our country would be one of violent oscillation between reckless upsetting of property rights, and unscrupulous greed manifested under pretense of protecting those rights. The agitator who preaches hatred and practices slander and untruthfulness, and the visionary who promises perfection and accomplishes only destruction, are the worst enemies of reform; and the man of great wealth who accumulates and uses his wealth without regard to ethical standards, who pro?ts by and breeds corruption, and robs and swindles others, is the very worst enemy of property, the very worst enemy of conservatism, the very worst enemy of those business interests that only too often regard him with mean admiration and heatedly endeavor to shield him from the consequences of his iniquity." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-colored foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"We can take reproof patiently from a book, but not from a tongue. The book hurts not our pride, the living reprover does; and we cannot bear to have our faults seen by others." - Thomas Adam

"We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual 'autism.'" - Thomas Berry

"To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself." - Thomas Carlyle

"Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there." - Thomas Hardy

"No man can be judge to his own cause." - Thomas Hobbes

"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

"I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind." - Thomas Jefferson

"It suffices for us if the moral and physical condition of our own citizens qualifies them to select the able and good for the direction of their government, with a recurrence of elections at such short periods as will enable them to displace an unfaithful servant before the mischief he mediates may be irremediable." - Thomas Jefferson

"Public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one's family and affairs." - Thomas Jefferson

"What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between “things” and “God” as if God were another “thing” and as if His creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached form ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. This is an entirely new perspective which many sincerely moral and ascetic minds fail utterly to see." - Thomas Merton

"Our knowledge of God is paradoxically not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion, as we are known to him that we find our real being. We know him in and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence." - Thomas Merton

"Prayers and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people. We may never succeed in this campaign, but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident. It is the great task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it. We must at least face this responsibility and do something about it. And the first job of all is to understand the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society." - Thomas Merton

"For freemen like brothers agree; With one spirit endured, they one friendship pursued, And their temple was Liberty Tree." - Thomas Paine

"It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive, that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet that they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent." - Thomas Paine

"A divine nature has no need of statues or altars; but human nature being very imbecile, and as much distant from divinity as earth from heaven, devised these symbols, in which it inserted the names and the renown of the gods. Those, therefore, whose memory is robust, and who are able, by directly extending their soul to heaven, to meet with divinity, have, perhaps no need of statues. This race is, however, rare among men, and in a whole nation you will not find one who recollects divinity, and who is not in want of this kind of assistance." - Maximus of Tyre, fully Cassius Maximus Tyrius NULL

"If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"Now the arguments of the relativist would be that it is impossible to find any basis for a universally binding moral law; but that it is quite easy to discover a basis for morality if moral codes are admitted to be variable, ephemeral, and relative to time, place, and circumstance." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"On 4th Avenue I was painting in black and white a lot. Not with a chip on my shoulder about it, but I needed a lot of paint and I wanted to get free of materials. I could get a gallon of black paint and a gallon of white paint, and I could go to town." - Willem de Kooning

"A woman's courage rises with the greatness of the emergency." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely." - Willard Gaylen

"Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furthermore, it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe these atomic processes, for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent a mathematical scheme - the quantum theory - which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic processes; for visualization, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies - the wave picture and the corpuscular picture." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. To be radical, according to Marx, means “going to the root of things.” If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain." - Wilhelm Reich

"The armored person cannot express himself with immediacy because his natural impulses are distorted, fragmented, inhibited, and transformed in the tangled net of his character structure. The armored person perceives himself and the world as complicated because he has no immediate contact, no straightforward relationship to the world around him. The secondary result is that over the years this world becomes actually complicated. Since these complications make an ordered existence impossible, artificial rules in "human intercourse" emerge: rigid mores, customs, rules of etiquette, diplomatic maneuvers." - Wilhelm Reich

"It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives. Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings." - Walter Lippmann

"'Text', from a root meaning 'to weave', is, in absolute terms, more compatible etymologically with oral utterance than is 'literature', which refers to letters etymologically/(literae) of the alphabet. Oral discourse has commonly been thought of even in oral milieus as weaving or stitching—rhapsoidein, to 'rhapsodize', basically means in Greek 'to stitch songs together'. But in fact, when literates today use the term 'text' to refer to oral performance, they are thinking of it by analogy with writing. In the literate's vocabulary, the 'text' of a narrative by a person from a primary oral culture." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"The grapholect bears the marks of the millions of minds which have used it to share their consciousnesses with one another. Into it has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Webster's Third New World Dictionary (1971) states in its Preface that it could have included "many times" more than the 450,000 words it does include. Assuming that "many times" must mean at least three times, and rounding out the figures, we can understand that the editors have on hand a record of some million and a half words used in print in English. Oral languages and oral dialects can get along with perhaps five thousand words or less." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"But one man never laughed. He was a giant among men. He was Bobby Darin and he was my friend." - Wayne Newton, "Mr. Las Vegas"

"How many of the ways (disciplines, exercises, practices) recommended as helpful, or even necessary, for the attainment of Satori are not in fact consequences of that state erroneously suggested as means?" - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"It is: because it is not, therefore it is. I (apparently) am: because I am not, therefore I am. Because Reality is Non-Reality, therefore it is Reality. Since Being is Non-Being, therefore it is Being… It seems apparent that there are three stages on this path. The pilgrim learns to understand that he is, after having understood that as an I-concept he is not. Then, only then, he comes to know that nevertheless he is not, for nothing is, not even he. And finally he realizes that in consequence of that and in a sense inconceivable before, he is. Hence the formula: I am: I am not, therefore I am." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"That singularity is language." - Walker Percy

"Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Laborers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Compassion is a spontaneous movement of wholeness. It is not a studied decision to help the poor, to be kind to the unfortunate. Compassion has a tremendous momentum that naturally, choicelessly moves us to worthy action. It has the force of intelligence, creativity, and the strength of love. Compassion cannot be cultivated; it derives neither from intellectual conviction nor from emotional reaction. It is simply there when the wholeness of life becomes a fact that is truly lived." - Vimala Thakar

"Self-education begins by watching how we are using the energy and learning how not to waste it through." - Vimala Thakar

"For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake…the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself." - Victor Cousin

"Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it." - Victor Hugo