Great Throughts Treasury

"Even on the cross He did not hide Himself from sight; rather, He made all creation witness to the presence of its Maker." - Saint Athanasius, aka Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Athanasius the Great, St. Athanasius I of Alexandria, St. Athanasius the Confessor, St. Athanasius the Apostolic NULL

"I receive Thee ransom of my soul. For love of Thee have I studied and kept vigil toiled preached and taught." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture." - Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech

"He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections." - Samuel Adams

"Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country." - Samuel Butler

"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

"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"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

"The iron rail proved a magicians' road. It virtually reduced England to a sixth of its size. It brought the country nearer to the town and the town to the country.... It energized punctuality, discipline, and attention; and proved a moral teacher by the influence of example." - Samuel Smiles

"The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man's individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown." - Samuel Smiles

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evilwere external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man." - Simone Weil

"What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Here you are, doggy! Good old Toby! Smell it, Toby, smell it! He pushed the creasote handkerchief under the dog's nose, while the creature stood with its fluffy legs separated, and with a most comical cock to its head, like a connoisseur sniffing the bouquet of a famous vintage." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"It is in mercy, I am persuaded, that God inflicts punishment." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

"Consider one of the standard laments or stories of wonder in conventional tales of natural history: the mayfly that lives but a single day (a sadness even recorded in the technical name for this biological group - Ephemoptera). Yes, the adult fly may enjoy only a moment in the sun, but we should honor the entire life cycle and recognize that the larvae, or juvenile stages, live and develop for months. Larvae are not mere preparations for a brief adulthood. We might better read the entire life cycle as a division of labor, with larvae as feeding and growing stages, and the adult as a short-lived reproductive machine. In this sense, we could well view the adult fly's day as the larva's clever and transient device for making a new generation of truly fundamental feeders." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Thus, we have three principles for increasing adequacy of data: if you must work with a single object, look for imperfections that record historical descent; if several objects are available, try to render them as stages of a single historical process; if processes can be directly observed, sum up their effects through time. One may discuss these principles directly or recognize the little problems that Darwin used to exemplify them: orchids, coral reefs, and worms—the middle book, the first, and the last." - Stephan Jay Gould

"We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information—not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise." - Stephan Jay Gould

"When we believe that we ought to be satisfied, rather than God glorified, we set God below ourselves, imagine that He should submit His own honor to our advantage; we make ourselves more glorious than God, as though we were not made for Him, but He made for us; this is to have a very low esteem of the majesty of God." - Stephen Charnock

"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe." - Stephen Hawking

"The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them." - Stefan Zweig

"I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life. I care for the great deeds of the past chiefly as spurs to drive us onward in the present. I speak of the men of the past partly that they may be honored by our praise of them, but more that they may serve as examples for the future." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Obedience of the law is demanded; not asked as a favor." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book." - Thomas Carlyle

"His eye is upon every hour of my existence. His spirit is intimately present with every thought of my heart. His inspiration gives birth to every purpose within me. His hand impresses a direction on every footstep of my goings. Every breath I inhale is drawn by an energy which God deals out to me." - Thomas Chalmers

"The beauty of holiness has done more, and will do more, to regenerate the world and bring in everlasting righteousness than all the other agencies put together." - Thomas Chalmers

"The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing." - Thomas Jefferson

"The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors." - Thomas Jefferson

"Were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, Does he use ardent spirits?" - Thomas Jefferson

"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson

"Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it." - Thomas Paine

"Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off." - Thomas Paine

"It may happen, that when appetite draws one way, it may be opposed, not by any appetite or passion, but by some cool principle of action, which has authority without any impulsive force." - Thomas Reid

"Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home." - Tibetan Book of the Dead NULL

"Goedel proved that a system of axioms can never be based on itself; in order to prove its validity, statements from outside must be used." - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

"The Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural ..... There was no misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict. .... No Agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an 'iron wall,' when they realize they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky

"If I were king, my pipe should be premier. The skies of time and chance are seldom clear, We would inform them all with bland blue weather. Delight alone would need to shed a tear, For dream and deed should war no more together. Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear; Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather; And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere, If I were king. But politics should find no harbour near; The Philistine should fear to slip his tether; Tobacco should be duty free, and beer; In fact, in room of this, the age of leather, An age of gold all radiant should appear, If I were king." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

"If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"Between subjective and objective there is no vital difference. Everything is illusive and more or less transparent. All phenomena, including man and his thoughts about himself, are nothing more than a movable, changeable alphabet. There are no solid facts to get hold of." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"But one day, some painter used ‘Abstraction’ as a title for one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a very tricky title. And it wasn’t really a very good one. From then on the idea became something extra. Immediately it gave some people the idea that they could free art from itself. Until then, Art meant everything that was in it – not what you could take off it. There was only one thing you could take out of it sometime when you were in the right mood – that abstract and indefinable sensation, the aesthetic part – and still leave it were it was." - Willem de Kooning

"Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectual deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment." - William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett

"Almost every house had a lonely and deserted look; for it was known that one or more beloved beings had gone out of it to the grave. A dark, heartless spirit was abroad. The whole land, in fact, mourned and nothing on which the eye could rest bore a green or thriving look or any symptom of activity, but the Churchyards, and here the digging and the delving were incessant - at the early twilight, during the gloomy noon, the dreary dusk, and the still more funereal-looking light of the midnight taper." - William Carleton

"In conclusion, I have endeavored, with what success has been already determined by the voice of my own country, to give a panorama of Irish life among the people … and in doing this, I can say with solemn truth that I painted them honestly and without reference to the existence of any particular creed or party." - William Carleton