Great Throughts Treasury

"If some of these millionaire faddists . . . would more keenly interest themselves in improving conditions, than trying to divert the attention of the workers to the millennium of the sweet by and by, they would be of more practical advantage to their fellows here, and now, as well as for the future." - Samuel Gompers

"The World War in which we are engaged in is on such a tremendous scale that we must readjust practically the whole nation's social and economic structure from a peace to a war basis. It devolves upon liberty-loving citizens, and particularly the workers of this country, to see to it that the spirit and the methods of democracy are maintained within our own country while we are engaged in a war to establish them in international relations. The fighting and the concrete issues of the war are so removed from our country that not all of our citizens have a full understanding of the principles of autocratic force which the Central Powers desire to substitute for the real principles of freedom." - Samuel Gompers

"Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and gain applause which he cannot keep." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates to the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science, the vicissitudes of learning and ignorance, the extinction and resuscitation of arts, and the revolutions of the intellectual world. - If accounts of battles and invasions are peculiarly the business of princes, the useful and elegant arts are not to be neglected, and those who have kingdoms to govern have understandings to cultivate." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Hope ... is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles." - Samuel Smiles

"Men cannot be raised in masses as the mountains were in he early geological states of the world. They must be dealt with as units; for it is only by the elevation of individuals that the elevation of the masses can be effectively secured." - Samuel Smiles

"If you are not one of us, you are one of them." - Sidney Lanier

"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"On the day of my conversion Charity entered into my heart and with it a yearning to forget self always; thenceforward I was happy." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas. It continues to surprise us." - Stephen Hawking

"Justice is the idea of God; the ideal of men; the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind." - Theodore Parker

"The great man has more of human nature than other men organized in him." - Theodore Parker

"Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The process has aroused much antagonism, a great part of which is wholly without warrant. It is not true that as the rich have grown richer the poor have grown poorer. On the contrary, never before has the average man, the wage-worker, the farmer, the small trader, been so well off as in this country and at the present time. There have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth; yet it remains true that a fortune accumulated in legitimate business can be accumulated by the person specially benefited only on condition of conferring immense incidental benefits upon others. Successful enterprise, of the type which benefits all mankind, can only exist if the conditions are such as to offer great prizes as the rewards of success." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Around us, life bursts with miracles--a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life's daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure." - Thomas Hardy

"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." - Thomas Jefferson

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Thomas Jefferson

"Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted." - Thomas Jefferson

"The object most interesting to me for the residue of my life, will be to see you both developing daily those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourselves, and acquiring those talents and that degree of science which will guard you at all times against ennui, the most dangerous poison of life. A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity....In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is." - Thomas Jefferson

"The uniform tenor of a man's life furnishes better evidence of what he has said or done on any particular occasion than the word of any enemy." - Thomas Jefferson

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." - Thomas Jefferson

"I have a profound mistrust of all obligatory answers. The great problem of our time is not to formulate clear answers to neat theoretical questions… The way to find the real ‘world’ is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self. But there I find the world to be quite different from the ‘obligatory answers.’ This ‘ground,’ this ‘world’ where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door. When I find the world in my own ground, it is impossible for me to be alienated by it. A humble man can do great things with an uncommon perfection because he is no longer concerned about incidentals, like his own interests and his own reputation, and therefore he no longer needs to waste his efforts in defending them. For a humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even of himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God before Whom no other power has any meaning and for Whom there is no such thing as an obstacle. Humility is the surest sign of strength." - Thomas Merton

"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man." - Thomas Paine

"Our job is not to have faith. We have faith already, whether we want it or not. It comes in our blood from our ancestors who gave their lives for it. Our job is to transport that higher vision that gave them their faith down into our minds, into our personalities, into our words, into our actions in daily life. To make it part of our selves and our world. " - Tzvi Freeman

"Instruments of religion and science must meet together." - Uttaradhyayana Sutra

"At proper time, appropriate work must be done." - Uttaradhyayana Sutra

"For 'tis a truth well known to most, that whatsoever thing is lost, we seek it, ere it comes to light, in every cranny but the right." - William Cowper

"The best and noblest parts of man depend precious little on culture, education, and whatever else it is called. One can never have enough respect for true humanity as it is visible in the persons of the totally uneducated classes, and never enough humility if one sometimes believes one is superior to them." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival." - Willard Gaylen

"A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty." - Walter Lippmann

"He only has known the full joy of living who somewhere and at some time has struck a decisive blow for the freedom of the human spirit." - Walter Lippmann

"In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right." - Walter Lippmann

"One might say that a nation is politically stable when nothing of radical consequence is determined by its elections." - Walter Lippmann

"The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary." - Walter Lippmann

"Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their country’s sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under." - Walter Lippmann

"As a group, lemmings have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquility in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness." - Washington Irving

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old." - Washington Irving

"For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Money comes and... goes. But morality? It comes and grows. Morality has to be grown in the heart by feeding it with Love; then only we can have justice, security, law and order." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Our heart should be full of compassion and free from negative qualities like hatred, hostility and jealousy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul." - Václav Havel

"Only the timid and the weak leave things to destiny (daivam) but the strong and the self-confident never bank on destiny or luck (bhagya)" - Valmiki NULL

"The image of the Buddha on the altar is clearly not a divinity or Sage. It is a representation, an artistic image ... that points back to human who realized the highest wisdom. The Buddha cultivated his nature to an awakened state. The image symbolizes his realization of humanity's potential and aspiration for the highest goodness and compassion. When you bow, symbolically you honor your own potential for great wisdom. Furthermore, bowing is good exercise. It is not idol worship, which is superstitious and passive. Bowing to the Buddha is a practice of a principle; it is dynamic and active." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

"Where duty is plain delay is both foolish and hazardous; where it is not, delay may be both wisdom and safety." - Tryon Edwards

"America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson