Great Throughts Treasury

"Death ends a life, not a relationship. " - Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz

"Inquiry not only begins with wonder, but usually ends with it also." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler

"Holiness is of a twofold nature; it begins as a quality of the service rendered to God, but it ends as a reward for such service. It is at first a type of spiritual effort, and then a kind of spiritual gift." - Moshe Chayim Luzzatto, also Moses Hayyim Luzzato, known by Hebrew acronym RaMCHal

"Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self." - Nadine Gordimer

"My dominion ends where that of conscience begins." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"It is only by prudence, wisdom, and dexterity that great ends are attained and obstacles overcome. Without these qualities nothing succeeds." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"Each of us A cell of awareness / Imperfect and incomplete / Genetic blends / With uncertain ends / On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet." - Neil Peart

"Anyone who relies too heavily on reason to achieve happiness, who analyses it, who, so to speak, quibbles over his enjoyment and can accept only refined pleasures, ends up not having any at all. He's like a man who wants to get rid of all the lumps in his mattress and eventually ends up sleeping on bare boards." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas

"The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man." - Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld

"The world ends for us when we are free from desires. I enjoy everything, but I have no desire for anything, so there is never any pain or disappointment from unfulfillment. Whatever I do, wherever I go, I enjoy myself." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. New art, it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ism.)" - Paul Klee

"Harmony thus appears as a temporary adjustment, established among all forces acting upon a given spot — a provisory adaptation; and that adjustment will only last under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions. Let but one of those forces be hampered in its action for some time and harmony disappears. Force will accumulate its effect; it must come to light, it must exercise its action, and if other forces hinder its manifestation it will not be annihilated by that, but will end by upsetting the present adjustment, by destroying harmony, in order to find a new form of equilibrium and to work to form a new adaptation. Such is the eruption of a volcano, whose imprisoned force ends by breaking the petrified lavas which hindered them to pour forth the gases, the molten lavas, and the incandescent ashes. Such, also, are the revolutions of mankind." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"If on the morrow of the revolution, the masses of the people have only phrases at their service, if they do not recognize, by clear and blinding facts, that the situation has been transformed to their advantage, if the overthrow ends only in a change of persons and formulae, nothing will have been achieved. ... In order that the revolution should be something more than a word, in order that the reaction should not lead us back tomorrow to the situation of yesterday, the conquest of today must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not be the poor today." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"The education we all receive from the State, at school and after, has so warped our minds that the very notion of freedom ends up by being lost, and disguised in servitude." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"The scientific method is a potentiation of common sense, exercised with a specially firm determination not to persist in error if any exertion of hand or mind can deliver us from it. Like other exploratory processes, it can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case. The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World—a story which we invent and criticise and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life. " - Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar

"Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us. " - Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

"To wherever one leans is where he ends up." - Philippine Proverbs, aka Philipino, Filipino, Ilocano and Tagalog Proverbs, Salawikain or Sawikain

"The continuance and frequent fits of anger produce in the soul a propensity to be angry; which ofttimes ends in choler, bitterness, and morosity, when the mid becomes ulcerated, peevish, and querulous, and is wounded by the least occurrence." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible. " - Albert Einstein

"Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task." - Richard Leakey, fully Richard Erskine Frere Leakey

"The perfection of means and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem." - Albert Einstein

"Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people." - Albert Einstein

"I read your categories of humanism with interest. They seem to me to be excellent and will be useful to me. As for myself, I do not know exactly where I fit. I do not know the realities of the cosmos. I only know that man with his hopes and aspirations, his capacity to sacrifice for an ideal is part of it. He uses the abilities with which he is endowed not only to maintain life but to find some meaning for it. His efforts to discover meaning ends in mystery. His attempt through the use of reason to add to his knowledge of the cosmos has brought a vast increase in that knowledge beyond the frontiers of which, however, lies mystery. To push out this frontier, to penetrate the mystery is his greatest challenge. I find that contemplation of the mystery brings that humility which is one of the virtues taught by religion. For me the aspirations (part of the cosmos) of men suggest an essence or being greater than man, worship of whom gives added strength for dealing with the vicissitudes of life." - Ralph Henry Gabriel

"Microsoft doesn't respect the antitrust laws, and it has amply demonstrated that it can't be trusted. The company has shown its contempt for any court-imposed changes in its conduct. If the government ends the antitrust case by seeking changes in its conduct, but not in its structure, Microsoft can be expected to creatively evade the thrust of such agreements." - Ralph Nader

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

"Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love." - Remy de Gourmont

"If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but thinking of the question that has been raised. The mind sees in two different senses: (1) sees, as with the eyes; and (2) sees a question (no eyes)." - René Margritte, fully René François Ghislain Magritte

"Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way." - Richard Dawkins

"Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, Is it reasonable? [doubting the great Descartes]" - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing" - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"The aim of Opera has ever been, and still is today, confined to Music. Merely so as to afford Music with a colorable pretext for her own excursions, is the purpose of Drama dragged on -- naturally, not to curtail the ends of Music, but rather to serve her simply as a means." - Richard Wagner, fully Wilhelm Richard Wagner

"There are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed." - Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright

"There are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed" - Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright

"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." - Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans

"God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes." - Robert Boyle

"Motherhood: All love begins and ends there." - Robert Browning

"The truth hurts like a thorn at first; but in the end it blossoms like a rose." - Samuel ha-Nagid, born Samuel ibn Naghrela or Naghrillah

"Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them." - Russell H. Conwell, fully Russell Herman Conwell

"All men enter this world through the same gate." - Russian Proverbs

"As long as the sun shines one does not ask for the moon" - Russian Proverbs

"Now the acts of expecting and remembering are the theoretical or speculative forms of the same conative activity which in its practical form is desire." - Samuel Alexander

"A comprehended god is no god" - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom

"Action should be something added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it. [Paraphrase]" - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"I distinctly remember when a little more than a dozen years ago the immigration question was first finding occasional expression in the labor organizations that I heard a member, who had left the Emerald Isle scarcely three years, denounce the evils the toilers suffer from immigration. From that time the thought occurred to me that there is something more in this world than philosophy and philanthropy which prompts the people to advocate measures of reformatory character." - Samuel Gompers

"A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them." - Samuel Pepys

"Anyone who denies the crimes and genocide of the past is opening up the way for the murders of the future." - Simon Wiesenthal

"Come, let us do honor to the man who has always honored us." - Simon Wiesenthal

"Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow. The future is made of the same stuff as the present." - Simone Weil