Great Throughts Treasury

"Appetite with an opinion of attaining is called hope; the same without such opinion despair." - Thomas Hobbes

"For all laws are general judgments, or sentences of the legislator; as also every particular judgment is a law to him whose case is judged." - Thomas Hobbes

"The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connections; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves." - Thomas Hobbes

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things." - Thomas Jefferson

"It behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves. We are able to preserve our self- government if we will but think so." - Thomas Jefferson

"No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations." - Thomas Jefferson

"The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings." - Thomas Jefferson

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I detest pornography. I utterly loathe writing that seeks to work on the passions and to exploit them, instead of releasing them in a healthy form : laughter … The utterly sick and subhuman reduction of ‘thought’ to nothingness: to something that appears to be sensual but is not even that." - Thomas Merton

"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another" - Thomas Merton

"There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts… see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me… it was magical. We are already one, yet we know it not." - Thomas Merton

"I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense." - 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

"Invention depends altogether upon execution or organization; as that is right or wrong so is the invention perfect or imperfect." - William Blake

"Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study." - William Congreve

"We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"Just been talking today out here to all the Senators investigating these stock swindles and overcapitalizations. There has been hundreds of millions lost. There ought to be some form of guardianship for people that buy all this junk. Education won't do it. (The buyers are) the ones we have educated up till they are just smart enough to fall for everything that comes along." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Personally, I have always felt that the best doctor in the world is the Veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter...he's just got to know." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"We live in an age of 'urge'. We do nothing till somebody shoves us." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Our faults and sins seem all the bigger when they are seen by the world against the excessively self-righteous picture that is our official version of ourselves." - Walter Lippmann

"By a kind of fashionable discipline, the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to emanate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness and good-will." - Washington Irving

"The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and clasical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"Politic man ordained imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears must be the crux for our compendia." - Wallace Stevens

"Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Someday death will take us to another star." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation." - Victor Hugo

"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Follow 'this' path... it is easily accessible and the cart can move freely on it.... treading on which the brave ones do not get vanquished and which also provides better prospects for earning wealth." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"A new burst of rage swept over him — What did it matter whether it was true or not — whether anything was true or not? What did it matter if anybody had done all the hideous and loathsome things that everybody else said they had done? It was what everybody was saying! It was what everybody believed — what everybody was interested in! It was the measure of a whole society — their ideals and their standards! It was the way they spent their time, repeating nasty scandals about each other; living in an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, with endless whispering and leering, and gossip of low intrigue." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"Money is the filthiest thing around. If you stay around it very long, you'll be defiled." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

"He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"Could the Cheerios be in bad voice? Might not they handle well on curves? Do they ejaculate too quickly? Has age affected their timing or are they merely in a mid-season slump? Afflicted with nervous exhaustion or broken hearts, are the Cheerios smiling bravely, insisting that the show must go on?" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"A wicked day, and not a holy day! What hath this day deserved? What hath it done That it in golden letters should be set Among the high tides in the calendar?" - William Shakespeare

"Cesario, by the roses of the spring, by maidhood, honor, truth, and everything, I love thee so, that maugre all thy pride, nor wit nor reason can my passion hide." - William Shakespeare

"As long as parents and teachers in general shall fall under the established rule, it is clear that politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all. They poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of the Eastern seraglios, they deprive us of our vitality, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle." - William Godwin

"Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not." - William James

"O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)" - William Shakespeare

"Grit is the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,--spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion and passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing submission with weakness, whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend." - Elif Safak

"But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." - Albert Einstein

"Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"You believe in God, for your part?--that He who makes can make good things from ill things, best from worst, as men plant tulips upon dunghills when they wish them finest." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate; As the voyage along thru life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women." - Emile Zola

"None have assurance at all times. As in a walk that is shaded with trees and checkered with light and shadow, some tracks and paths in it are dark and others are sunshine. Such is usually the life of the most assured. " - Ezekial Hopkins

"God . . . sanctified the Sabbath, when he selected it out of the course of other days, and set it apart from the common employments and services of life; ordaining that the spiritual concernments of his glory and our salvation should be therein especially transacted. And this is that blessing which God hath conferred upon this day. For what other benefit is a day capable of, but only, that, when the other six days, like the unregarded vulgar of the year, were to be employed in the low and sordid drudgery of earthly affairs. This Seventh Day God hath raised from the dunghill, and set upon the throne, appointing it, according to Ignatius's phrase, "The prince and sovereign of days," exempting it form all servile works; and designing it for such spiritual and celestial employments, that, were it observed according to God's command, eternity itself would not have much advantage above it, but only that it is longer. So that, in the ring of the week, the Sabbath is the jewel, the most excellent and precious of days." - Ezekial Hopkins

"I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff." - Felix Adler