Great Throughts Treasury

"Fear is an insidious virus. Given a breeding place in our minds, it will permeate the whole body of our work; it will eat away our spirit and block the forward path of our endeavors. Fear is the greatest enemy of progress... Fear is met and destroyed with courage." - James Ford Bell

"Anyone who is thoroughly familiar with the language and literature of a people cannot be wholly its enemy." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"A panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a gong over to the enemy, of our imagination." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"Trust not any man with thy life, credit, or estate. For it is mere folly for a man to enthrall himself to his friend, as though, occasion being offered, he should not dare to become an enemy." - William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 1st Baron Burghley, also Lord William Cecil Burleigh

"Choose a friend. He will help you. Alas, he deserts you. Choose an enemy. He will fight against you. Lo, he corrects and perfects you." - Sri Chinmoy, born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose

"Ignorance is an enemy, even to its owner. Knowledge is a friend, even to its hater. Ignorance hates knowledge because it is too pure. Knowledge fears ignorance because it is too sure." - Sri Chinmoy, born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose

"We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him." - Cleobulus NULL

"And you shall find the greatest enemy a man can have is his prosperity." - Samuel Daniel

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend." -

"To suppose there is some one unchanging native force which generates war is as naive as the usual assumption that our enemy is actuated solely by the meaner of the tendencies named and we only by the nobler." - John Dewey

"I am persuaded that he who is capable of being a bitter enemy can never possess the necessary virtues that constitute a true friend." - William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne

"Do good to thy friend to keep him -- to thine enemy to gain him." - Benjamin Franklin

"For the want of a nail, the shoe was lose; for the want of a shoe the horse was lose; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail." - Benjamin Franklin

"It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion." -

"Incessant change, everlasting innovation, seem to be dictated by the true interests of mankind. But government is the perpetual enemy of change... The wise man is satisfied with nothing." - William Godwin

"Nothing would contribute more to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view." - Charles Montagu Halifax, 1st Earl of Halifax, Lord Halifax

"Whatever therefore is consequent to a tie of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes

"I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation." - Soozi Holbeche

"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." - Sally Kempton

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"A small sum makes a debtor, a larger sum an enemy." - Laberius, full name Decimus Laberius NULL

"There is no greater evil than making light of the enemy." -

"I found that a hospital is probably the most difficult environment in which to afford a really good death. Hospitals are meant to preserve life; death is an enemy there. Death is not treated with much respect, with much compassion. There’s a lot of fear surrounding death. Death is a failure in a hospital." -

"Liberty is a living thing that passes from one generation to the next... The greatest enemy of a living thing is not its enemies but its friends who wish to cling to its antiquated form." - Ludwig Lewisohn

"I often feel that death is not the enemy of life, but its friend, for it is the knowledge that our years are limited which makes them so precious." -

"He who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be praised as he who does so by force." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject. The actual enemy is the unknown." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Habit creates the appearance of justice: progress has no greater enemy than habit." -

"Religion would not have enemies, if it were not an enemy to their vices." - John Baptiste Massillon

"I need my enemy in my community. He keeps me alert, vital... But beyond what we specifically learn from our enemies, we need them emotionally, our psychic economy cannot get along well without them... Our enemy is as necessary for us as is our friend. Both together are part of authentic community." -

"The small reform may become the enemy of the great one." -

"To live unto eternity is to live unto aeon, unto unity, unto wholeness, completeness, unto the integration of all the life. And this is now. The enemy to now is the illusion of passing-time... When we reach the now the world is turned the other way round. We are at the centre of things. The responsibility is ours. Had we now in our lives we would cease to blame.... Universe evolves out of one’s own mind... because the WORLD is a series of possible mental transformations" - Maurice Nicoll

"Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress." - Max Nordau, fully Max Simon Nordau, born Simon Maximilian Südfeld

"The world is large when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide; but the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side." - John Boyle O'Reilly

"We have met the enemy and they are ours." - Oliver Hazard Perry

"Taste is the enemy of creativeness." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"It is this earth that, like a kind mother, receives us at our birth, and sustains us when born; it is this alone, of all the elements around us, that is never found an enemy of man." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL

"The most positive men are the most credulous, since they most believe themselves, and advise most with their falsest flatterer and worst enemy - their own self-love." - Alexander Pope

"It is clear that property in itself owes allegiance to no particular form of government, and is bound by no dynastic or legal ties. Its politics may be summed up in a single word: exploitation, or even anarchy. It is the most formidable enemy and most treacherous ally of any form of power. In short, in its relation to the State it is governed by only one principle, one sentiment, one concern: self-interest, or egoism... That is why all governments, all utopias, and all Churches distrust property... We can conclude that property is the greatest existing revolutionary force, with an unequaled capacity for setting itself against authority." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"A small loan makes a debt; a great one an enemy." - Publius Syrus

"An enemy despised is the most dangerous of all enemies." - Publius Syrus

"Formidable is the enemy that lurks in a man's own breast." - Publius Syrus

"That is a most wretched fortune which is without an enemy." - Publius Syrus

"If thou expect death as a friend, prepare to entertain it; if thou expect death as an enemy, prepare to overcome it; death has no advantage, but when it comes a stranger." - Francis Quarles

"Did a person but know the value of an enemy, he would purchase him with pure gold." - Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, Abbé de Rancé

"Better an intelligent enemy than an ignorant friend." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Reveal not every secret you have to a friend, for how can you tell but that friend may hereafter become an enemy. And bring not all the mischief you are able to do upon an enemy, for he may one day become your friend." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"When thou seest thine enemy in trouble, curl not thy whiskers in contempt; for in every bone there is marrow, and within every jacket there is a man." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller