Great Throughts Treasury

"Old men grasp more at life than babies, and leave it with much worse grace than young people. It is because all their labours have been for this life, they perceive at last their trouble lost." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"When a law is proposed in the people’s assembly, what is asked of them is not precisely whether they approve of the proposition or reject it, but whether it is in conforming with the general will which is theirs; each by giving his vote gives his opinion on this question, and the counting of votes yields a declaration of the general will. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to my own prevails, this proves only that I have made a mistake, and that what I believed to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had prevailed against the general will, I should have done something other than what I had willed, and then I should not have been free. This presupposes, it is true, that all characteristics of the general will are still to be found in the majority; when these cease to be there, no matter what position men adopt, there is no longer any freedom." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye." -

"Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men this comes chiefly through their work." -

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, - more than ruin, more even than death." -

"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact." -

"Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great works springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world." -

"The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women." -

"The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men." -

"Collision is as necessary to produce virtue in men as it is to elicit fire in inanimate matter; and chivalry is the essence of virtue." - John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Lord John Russell

"Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness, and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more." - Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

"Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only a virtue when men have it whether they will or not." - George Savile, fully Sir George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax

"Who is wise? The man who can learn something from every man. Who is strong? The man who overcomes his passion. Who is rich? The man who is content with his fate. Whom do men honor? The man who honors his fellow man." - Sayings of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot or Pirqe Aboth) NULL

"You must give some time to your fellow men. Even if it's a little thing, do something for others - something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it." - Albert Schweitzer

"Knowledge alone does not stop men from evil. The poor and the ignorant are not the greatest sinners. Man's mind may unfold, his intellect grow more keen, his understanding more profound, yet side by side with this may be a moral degeneration such as existed in pagan Greece and Rome." - William A. Scully, fully Bishop William Aloysius Scully

"We measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves." - John Selden

"Human affairs are not so happily arranged that the best things please the most men. It is the proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob." -

"If sensuality were happiness, beasts were happier than men; but human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh." -

"It is safer to offend certain men than it is to oblige them; for as proof that they owe nothing they seek recourse in hatred." -

"It is the edge and temper of the blade that make a good sword, not the richness of the scabbard, and so it is not money or possessions that make men considerable, but virtue." -

"It is the superfluous things for which men sweat." -

"Live among men as if God were watching. Talk to God as if men were listening." -

"Men practice war; beasts do not." -

"Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears; the effect of precepts is therefore slow and tedious, whilst that of examples is summary and effectual." -

"Show me a man who is not a slave. One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear...no servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed." -

"That which is good makes men good." -

"The best way to do good to ourselves, is to do it to others; the right way to gather, is to scatter. This is the law of benefits between men; the one ought to forget at once what he has given, and the other ought never forget what he has received." -

"The principal reason for sex deification is loss of belief in God. Once men lose God, they lose the purpose of life; and when the purpose of living is forgotten, the universe becomes meaningless. Man then tries to forget his emptiness in the intensity of a momentary experience." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

"Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice; whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born." - William Shenstone

"For his entire life he was in the company of wise men and Of all the things beneficial to one’s body, silence is the best. [paraphrase]" - Shimon HaTzaddik

"Men make mistakes not because they think they know when they do not know, but because they think others do not know." - Sholem Aleichem, pen name of Sholem Yakovf Rabinowitz or Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich

"Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent." - William Gilmore Simms

"The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be." - O. Carl Simonton

"Whenever we cease to hate, to despite, and to persecute those who think differently from ourselves, whenever we look on them calmly, we find among them men of pure hearts and unbiased judgments, who, reasoning on the same data with ourselves, have arrived at different conclusion on the subject of the spiritual world." - Jean Charles Sismondi, fully Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." -

"Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one’s duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic." - Samuel Smiles

"Courage is by no means incompatible with tenderness. On the contrary, gentleness and tenderness have been found to characterize the men, no less than the women, who have done the most courageous deeds." - Samuel Smiles

"It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failure." - Samuel Smiles

""Knowledge is power," but... knowledge of itself, unless wisely directed, might merely make bad men more dangerous." - Samuel Smiles

"Good character is human nature in its best form. It is moral order embodied in the individual. Men of character are not only the conscience of society, but in every well governed state they are its best motive power; for it is moral qualities which, in the main, rule the world." - Samuel Smiles

"When a men is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness." - Alexander Smith

"Goodness and virtue make men know and love, believe and delight in their immortality. When the soul is purged and enlightened by true sanctity, it is more capable of those divine irradiations, whereby it feels itself in conjunction with God. It knows that almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death." -

"Freedom is a dreadful thing unless it goes hand in hand with responsibility. Democracy among men is a specter except when the hearts of men are mature." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

"As a man grows older, he values the voice of experience more and the voice of prophecy less. He finds more of life's wealth in the common pleasures - home, health, children. He thinks more about worth of men and less about their wealth. He boasts less and boosts more. He hurries less, and usually makes more progress. He esteems the friendship of God a little higher." - Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist

"It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget." - Sydney Smith

"One of the best methods of rendering study agreeable is to live with able men, and to suffer all those pangs of inferiority which the want of knowledge always inflicts." - Sydney Smith

"Of all the sights which can soften and humanize the heart of men, there is none that ought so surely to reach it as that of innocent children, enjoying the happiness which is their proper and natural portion." - Robert Southey

"Men can govern anything more easily than their tongues." -

"Men who are governed by reason... desire for themselves nothing which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind." -