Great Throughts Treasury

"If we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that viewing things from a basically different perspective—that of our adversary—we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically." - Thomas Merton

"It is sometimes discouraging to see how small the peace movement is, and especially here in America where it is most necessary. But we have to remember that this is the usual pattern, and the Bible has led us to expect it. Spiritual work is done with disproportionately small and feeble instruments.. And now above all when everything is so utterly complex, and when people collapse under the burden of confusions and cease to think at all, it is natural that few may want to take on the burden of trying to effect something in the moral and spiritual way, in political action. Yet this is precisely what has to be done." - Thomas Merton

"It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this. There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed. This new language of prayer has to come out of something that transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone." - Thomas Merton

"My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and ‘awareness.’ This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or non-accomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes." - Thomas Merton

"Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and “one body,” will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time." - Thomas Merton

"Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help, that we all need. The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God. All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death. It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father. It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this." - Thomas Merton

"The way to find the real “world” is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self." - Thomas Merton

"The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist... It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door." - Thomas Merton

"There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand." - Thomas Merton

"Though he now has the capacity to communicate anything, anywhere, instantly, man finds himself with nothing to say. Not that there are not many things he could communicate, or should attempt to communicate. He should, for instance, be able to meet with his fellow man and discuss ways of building a peaceful world. He is incapable of this kind of confrontation. Instead of this, he has intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can deliver nuclear death to tens of millions of people in a few moments. This is the most sophisticated message modern man has, apparently, to convey to his fellow man. It is, of course, a message about himself, his alienation from himself, and his inability to come to terms with life." - Thomas Merton

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." - Thomas Merton

"To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life." - Thomas Merton

"Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire." - Thomas Merton

"The Human Abstract - Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. And mutual fear brings peace, Till the selfish loves increase; Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care. He sits down with holy fears, And waters the ground with tears; Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot. Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the caterpillar and fly Feed on the Mystery. And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the raven his nest has made In its thickest shade. The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro’ Nature to find this tree; But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human brain. [END OF THE SONGS OF EXPERIENCE] " - William Blake

"I heard an Angel singing When the day was springing: ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace Is the world’s release.’ Thus he sang all day Over the new-mown hay, Till the sun went down, And haycocks lookèd brown. I heard a Devil curse Over the heath and the furze: ‘Mercy could be no more If there was nobody poor, ‘And Pity no more could be, If all were as happy as we.’ At his curse the sun went down, And the heavens gave a frown. [Down pour’d the heavy rain Over the new reap’d grain; And Misery’s increase Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.]" - William Blake

"The lapse of time and rivers is the same, Both speed their journey with a restless stream; The silent pace, with which they steal away, No wealth can bribe, no prayers persuade to stay; Alike irrevocable both when past, And a wide ocean swallows both at last. Though each resemble each in every part, A difference strikes at length the musing heart; Streams never flow in vain; where streams abound, How laughs the land with various plenty crown’d! But time, that should enrich the nobler mind, Neglected, leaves a dreary waste behind. " - William Cowper

"So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man." - William Barclay

"For the eye altering alters all; the senses roll themselves in fear and the flat earth becomes a ball." - William Blake

"Plants fruits of life and beauty there." - William Blake

"To my eye Rubens' coloring is most contemptible. His shadows are a filthy brown somewhat the color of excrement." - William Blake

"Where the youth pined away with desire, and the pale virgin shrouded in snow, arise from their graves and aspire, where my sun-flower wishes to go." - William Blake

"Our English tongue is, I will not say as sacred as the Hebrew, or as learned as the Greek, but as fluent as the Latin, as courteous as the Spanish, as courtlike as the French, and as amorous as the Italian." - William Camden

"Ye therefore who love mercy, teach your sons to love it, too." - William Cowper

"Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"People who read stories are said to have excitable brains." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"The various systems of doctrine that have held dominion over man have been demonstrated to be true beyond all question by rationalists of such power—to name only a few—as Aquinas and Calvin and Hegel and Marx. Guided by these master hands the intellect has shown itself more deadly than cholera or bubonic plague and far more cruel. The incompatibility with one another of all the great systems of doctrine might surely be have expected to provoke some curiosity about their nature." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"Everyone falls down. Getting back up is how you learn how to walk." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"That a Man should know the measure of his Gift, that he may desire and take a better when God giveth it." - Walter Hilton

"Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government." - Walter Lippmann

"The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." - Wendell Berry

"In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"If indeed there were a judgment-day, it would be for man to appear at the bar not as a criminal but as accuser." - W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

"No natural science can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"A fault is fostered by concealment." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"Have no fear to not know where you are going in life." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Little by little, step by step, see what happens to you as you deliberately abandon your rage and hostility." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Quit thinking that you must halt before the barrier of inner negativity. You need not. You can crash through...whatever we see a negative state; that is where we can destroy it." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"The more a man neglects his own life the more he will be compelled to wrongly involve himself in the lives of others. This accounts for the neurotic reformer, the busybody, the general troublemaker. Being self-deceived he will always credit himself with noble motives. This is a good example of the wrong use of natural energy." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"An admirable thing, the poetry of a people is the gauge of its progress. The quantity of civilization is measured by the quantity of imagination." - Victor Hugo

"There are certain emotions which can find expression only in silence.)" - Victor Hugo

"Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"Nobility is a legacy, like gold and diamonds." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"That does not offend society is not the purview of justice." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The mind discerns and chooses, but it is the soul that breathes." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Have fame worse than stay away from her. Succeed in business is worse than ignore them." - Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming

"There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly