Great Throughts Treasury

"The divine Instructor is trustworthy, adorned as He is with three of the fairest ornament-knowledge, benevolence, and authority of utterance: with knowledge, for He is the paternal wisdom: 'All Wisdom is from the Lord, and with Him for evermore;' with authority of utterance, for He is God and Creator: 'For all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made;' and with benevolence, for He alone gave Himself a sacrifice for us." - Clement of Alexandria, originally Titus Flavius Clemens NULL

"Men and woman, young and old, rich and poor, the sanguine and despondent, the sick and whole, rulers and ruled, the wise and ignorant, the cowardly and courageous, the wrathful and meek, the successful and failing, do not require the same instruction and encouragement." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

"And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster." - Stephan Jay Gould

"This essay treats the most celebrated story in the extreme simplification in an adult parasite - in the interests of illuminating, reconciling, and, perhaps, even resolving two major biases that have so hindered our understanding of natural history: the misequation of evolution with progress, and the undervaluing of an organism by considering only its adult form and not the entire life cycle." - Stephan Jay Gould

"For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago." - Stefan Zweig

"We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated." - Thomas Arnold

"We might well believe that the law of universal gravitation whereby each physical reality attracts and is attracted to every other physical reality has its correspondence in the hidden or overt attraction of all human beings and all human societies to each other. This attraction takes place within a functional balance of tensions whereby each is sustained in its existence by all the others even as each sustains the others in existence. This seems to be demonstrated in the extensive and continuing efforts of humans to encounter each other and to establish a universal network of communication throughout the human order." - Thomas Berry

"While our universities have gone through many transitions since they first came into being in the early medieval period, they have never experienced anything like the transition that is being asked of them just now. The difficulty cannot be resolved simply by establishing a course or a program in ecology, for ecology is not a course or a program. Rather it is the foundation of all courses, all programs, and all professions because ecology is a functional cosmology. Ecology is not a part of medicine; medicine is an extension of ecology. Ecology is not a part of law; law is an extension of ecology. So too, in their own way, the same can be said of economics and even the humanities." - Thomas Berry

"For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it." - Thomas Hobbes

"For there is no good inclination that is not of the operation of God." - Thomas Hobbes

"The right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished. - Thomas Hobbes." - Thomas Hobbes

"It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified." - Thomas Jefferson

"And beyond the Wegknies, between hill and mountain wall between the rusty colored pines, through whose branches sunbeams fell, it happened and went wonderful that Castorp, left by Joachim, who overtook lovely sick that he with male kicks her passing by, and in the moment when he to the right of her was, with a hatless bow and spoken in a low voice, 'Good morning,' she respectfully (why actually: respectfully) welcomed and answer from her received: courtesy not more astonished head tilt, she thanked, also said in turn good morning in his own language, with her ??eyes smiled, - and all this was something else, something thoroughly and blissful but the look on his boots, it was a stroke of luck and a turn of events for good and very best, quite unprecedented way and almost the comprehension border, it was the salvation." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Some of necessities go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smoldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I'm actually surprised how well we've done. We've made more progress in the first 100 days of this one than any other joint venture I've been involved in." - Thomas Nagel

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity." - Thomas Paine

"Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil." - Thomas Paine

"The world is neutral and cannot give meaning to men, If someone wants life to be meaningful he cannot discover that meaning but must provide it himself. How we go about giving meaning to life seems to depend upon the society we accept as our own; a Frenchman might leap into the dark, an American go to a psycho-analyst, and an Englishman cease asking embarrassing questions." - W. D. Joske, fully William "Bill"

"Kandinsky understood ‘form’ as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be ‘simple as a child’. He intended, with his ‘inner-self’ to rid himself of ‘philosophical barricades’ (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me." - Willem de Kooning

"New York is a great city, but in the long run I got kind of dried out by everything happening there day and night. I was less and less able to work regularly." - Willem de Kooning

"The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space." - Willem de Kooning

"I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign." - Walter Lippmann

"I have always thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name from a too transparent honesty. Less direct minds would have found high-sounding ethical sanctions in which to conceal the real intent." - Walter Lippmann

"Relationships based on obligation lack dignity." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"We are divine enough to ask and we are important enough to receive." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits." - Wendell Berry

"Bring out the coffin, let the mourning cry. Let the planes flying in circles high in the sky the message Scratching : He Is Dead, Put beige neck ties of white pigeons from the ground, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday inert, My noon, my midnight, my song, my speech, I thought love was forever: I was wrong. 's stars are not necessary: ??remove each one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun do; Empty Ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can in some good cause." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods Our blue shadows are enormous We move in a gigantic, joyful world" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Chance is a word void of sense, nothing can exist without a cause." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"What can we say to a man who tells you that he would rather obey God than men, and that therefore he is sure to go to heaven for butchering you? Even the law is impotent against these attacks of rage; it is like reading a court decree to a raving maniac. These fellows are certain that the holy spirit with which they are filled is above the law, that their enthusiasm is the only law that they must obey." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone." - Václav Havel

"There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit." - Václav Havel

"There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight." - Václav Havel

"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace." - Václav Havel

"The most bizarre contradictions enter the same character and form." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. The true object of juvenile education, is to provide, against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn. Whatever will inspire habits of industry and observation, will sufficiently answer this purpose." - William Godwin