Great Throughts Treasury

"As human beings, our greatness lay not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the Atomic Age - as in being able to remake ourselves." -

"The Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little." -

"I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not." - Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular." -

"Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age." -

"All the progress humanity has made appears to be endangered by the very technological skills that humans have achieved. We live in an age in which the evils that humans inflict on others have reached unparalleled extremes of barbarism." - P. D. Premasiri, fully Pahalawattage Don Premasiri

"I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

"Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"It is personalities, not principles, that move the age." -

"Every age needs people who will redeem the time by living with a vision of things that are to be." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Every age needs people who will redeem the time by living with a vision of things that are to be." -

"Every age needs people who will redeem the time by living with a vision of things that are to be." -

"Real growth comes only through self-acceptance. AS long as we deny any aspect of our being, we make believe that something could be outside of God. It is as if we say, “God is everywhere; He fills all time and space - except for this part of my body and what I did at age fifteen.”" - Alan Cohen

"Real growth comes only through self-acceptance. AS long as we deny any aspect of our being, we make believe that something could be outside of God. It is as if we say, “God is everywhere; He fills all time and space - except for this part of my body and what I did at age fifteen.”" -

"Real growth comes only through self-acceptance. AS long as we deny any aspect of our being, we make believe that something could be outside of God. It is as if we say, “God is everywhere; He fills all time and space - except for this part of my body and what I did at age fifteen.”" -

"Love, the last defense against old age – the last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbors, the best." -

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten." -

"Love, the last defense against old age – the last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbors, the best." -

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten." -

"Love, the last defense against old age – the last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbors, the best." -

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten." -

"An army is a nation within a nation; it is one of the vices of our age." - Alfred Victor de Vigny

"The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may be." - Amos Bronson Alcott

"Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age." - Aristotle NULL

"Education is the best provision for old age." - Aristotle NULL

"In an age in which mankind’s collective power has suddenly been increased, for good or evil, a thousandfold through the tapping of atomic energy, the standard of conduct demanded from ordinary human beings can be no lower than the standard in times past by rare saints." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"In an age in which mankind’s collective power has suddenly been increased, for good or evil, a thousand-fold through the tapping of atomic energy, the standard of conduct demanded from ordinary human beings can be no lower than the standard attained in times past by rare saints." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Memory tempers prosperity, consoles adversity, cautions youth, and delights old age." - Author Unknown NULL

"If you would keep young and happy, be good; live a high moral life; practice the principles of the brotherhood of man; send out good thoughts to all, and think evil of no man. This is in obedience to the great natural law; to live otherwise is to break this great Divine law. Other things being equal, it is the cleanest, purest minds that live long and are happy. The man who is growing and developing intellectually does not grow old like the man who has stopped advancing, but when ambition, aspirations and ideals halt, old age begins." - Author Unknown NULL

"You’ve reached middle age when all you exercise is caution." - Author Unknown NULL

"A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice; a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself." - Baltasar Gracián

"How blest would our age be if it could witness a religion freed from all the trammels of superstition!" -

"Age is frequently beautiful, wisdom appearing like an aftermath." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"The disappointment of Manhood succeeds to the delusion of Youth; let us hope that the heritage of Old Age is not despair." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"The spirit of the age is the very thing that a great man changes." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"The value of philosophy is to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. He who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thought and free them from the tyranny of custom." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"To teach how to live with uncertainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"To teach how to live with uncertainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Love has no age, as it is always renewing itself." - Blaise Pascal

"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." -

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18." - Carl Sagan

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

"In an age remarkable for good reasoning and bad conduct, for sound rules and corrupt manners, when virtue fills our heads, but vice our hearts; when those who would fain persuade us that they are quite sure of heaven, appear in no greater hurry to go there than other folks, but put on the livery of the best master only to serve the worst; in an age when modesty herself is more ashamed of detection than delinquency; when independence of principle consists in having no principle on which to depend; and free thinking, not in thinking freely, but in being free from thinking; in an age when patriots will hold anything except their tongues; keep anything except their word; and lose nothing patiently except their character; to improve such an age must be difficult; to instruct it dangerous; and he stands no chance of amending it who cannot at the same time amuse it." - Charles Caleb Colton

"How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are looking backward to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time." - Charles Caleb Colton

"In the age of acorns, a single barleycorn had been of more value to mankind than all the diamonds in the mines of India." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age." - Charles Caleb Colton