Great Throughts Treasury

"Each man’s nature in one way and another is vitally associated with the life and well-being of every other individual in the world and what affects one must in some degree affect the rest of humanity." - Baird T. Spalding

"The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power." - Baird T. Spalding

"Self-love, in the true sense, is the love of one’s real good - of truth, of virtue, of beauty, of God. It is the strongest in those who are most alive in their higher nature. It is the opposite of selfish love." - John Lancaster Spalding

"He who would take good care of his health should be sparing in his tastes, banish his worries, temper his desires, restrain his emotions, take good care of his vital force, spare his words, regard lightly success and failure, ignore sorrows and difficulties, drive away foolish ambitions, avoid great likes and dislikes, calm his vision and his hearing, and be faithful in his internal regimen. How can one have sickness if he does not tire his spirits and worry his soul? Therefore he would nourish his nature should eat only when he is hungry and not fill himself with food, and he should drink only when he is thirsty and not fill himself with too much drink. He should eat little and between long intervals, and not too much and not too constantly. He should aim at being a little hungry when well-filled, and being a little well-filled when hungry. Being well-filled hurts the lungs and being hungry hurts the flow of vital energy." - Ssemiao NULL

"Only for the soul that is reconciled to God is nature as a whole renewed; difficult moral questions, which are insoluble for the mind, resolve themselves without the least struggle; life once more becomes beautiful and lofty." - Nicholas Stankevich

"Patterns and structure. Everywhere we look we see them. What appears random and chaotic also has order. And on Earth much of the order is linked to interrelationships that drive constant change. Cycles and rhythms. Pulses and flows. Changes in magnetic fields. Continental plates moving. Water cycles. Seasons changing. Life and death. Process and connection. Nature flows through webs of structure and shifting time: from ocean to cloud to rain to river to ocean. Natural rhythms." - Payson R. Stevens

"“Holy” has the same root as “wholly”; it means complete. A man is not complete in spiritual nature if all his mind, heart, soul, strength are not given to God." - R. J. Stewart, fully Robert John Stewart

"It has become almost banal to say that the atomic age has fundamentally altered the nature of war. No nuclear power can tell another: “Do as I say or I shall kill you,” but is reduced to saying: “Do as I say or I shall kill us both,” which is an entirely different matter." -

"There [are] two opposing drives in human nature: the drive toward closeness to other human beings, and the drive toward being independent and self-sufficient." - Anthony Storr

"There is nothing pleasurable save what is uniform with the most inmost depths of the divine nature." - Henry Suso

"All things are eternal by their very nature." - Sutrakritanga Sutra

"Human nature is directed at an open-ended, endless, in-finite, all-embracing, comprehensive knowing and loving and knowing freely acting." - Leonard Swindler

"The Torah preceded creation in that it was the idea behind creation. It is the primordial knowledge of existence. It is the idea to which life is nothing more than a means. God is eternal, and the temporary nature of the physical creation is contradictory to eternity. Creation, therefore, it not an end in itself; it is a means. It is a means for giving the part of creation made in the Divine image – mankind – the opportunity to earn a share with Hashem in eternity." - Ezriel Tauber

"In Nature we best see God under a disguise so heavy that it allows us to discern little more than that someone is there; within our own moral life we see Him with the mask, so to say, half fallen off." - Alfred Edward Taylor

"For philosophy it is which is the material of the world’s wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy." -

"Nature is a school-mistress, the soul the pupil; and whatever one has taught or the other learned has come from God - the Teacher of the teacher." -

"Nature has no heart… Absolute nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless, but lives in the life of God: and in so far, and so far merely, as man himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with Nature." - Francis Thomson

"A Reason, or universal self-consciousness, transcends the awareness of oneself in potential conflict with others, because it consists of awareness of oneself and others as existing in the universal infinite Spirit. Reason sees nature as the expression of the infinite Spirit." - Garrett Thomson

"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

"In the degree, however, that you come into a vital realization of your oneness with the Infinite Spirit of Life, whence all life in individual form has come and is continually coming, and in the degree that through this realization you open yourself to its divine inflow, you set into operation forces that will sooner or later bring even the physical body into a state of abounding health and strength. For to realize that this Infinite Spirit of Life can from its very nature admit of no disease, and to realize that this, then, is the life in you, by realizing your oneness with it, you can so open yourself to its more abundant entrance that the diseased bodily conditions - effects - will respond to the influences of its all-perfect power, this either quickly or more tardily, depending entirely on yourself." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Many will receive great help, and many will be entirely healed by a practice somewhat after the following nature: Wit a mind at peace, and with a heart going out in love to all, go into the quiet of your own interior self, holding the thought - I am one with the Infinite Spirit of Life, the life of my life. I then as spirit, I a spiritual being, can in my own real nature admit of no disease. I now open my body, in w2hich disease has obtained a foothold, I open it fully to the inflowing tide of this Infinite Life, and it now, even now, is pouring in and coursing through my body, and the healing process is going on. Realize this so fully that you begin to feel a quickening and a warming glow imparted by the life forces to the body. Believe the healing process is going on. Believe it, and hold continually to it. Many people greatly desire a certain thing but expect something else. They have greater faith in the power of evil than in the power of good, and hence they remain ill." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself." -

"Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it." - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

"Soundless, formless, intangible, undying, tasteless, orderless, eternal, immutable, beyond Nature, is the Self." - Katha Upanishad

"There is only one such Self, and that one self is you. Standing behind this little nature is what we call the Soul… He is the Soul of your soul… You are one with Him." - Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL

"You are a part of the Infinite. This is your nature. Hence you are your brother’s keeper." - Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL

"Man is, indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify all other organic beings… Man has not only escaped natural selection himself, but he is actually able to take away some of that power from nature which before his appearance she universally exercised." - Alfred Russell Wallace

"We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave of text and legend. Reason’s voice and God’s, Nature’s and Duty’s, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save justice and mercy and humility, a reasonable service of good deeds, pure living, tenderness to human needs, reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see the Master’s footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, but the calm beauty of an ordered life whose very breathing is unworded praise! A life that stands as all true lives have stood firm-rooted in the faith that God is good." - John Greenleaf Whittier

"A conception of human nature can be somewhat self-fulfilling." -

"The art of arts it the art of loving. Nature itself and God, nature’s author, are its teachers. For love itself is given by the creator of nature, and unless its natural purity has been soiled by some adulterous affection, love teaches itself, I say, to its own disciples, to the disciples of God." - William of Saint Thierry NULL

"What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find expression. It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture." -

"Our power to think things out about human nature… is liable to be blocked by our fear of the full implication of what we find." - Donald Woods Winnicott

"The overall similarity between mathematics and nature must have a deeper origin, both involving processes that can be thought of as computations." - Stephen Wolfram

"When it comes to more complex behavior mathematics has never in fact done well at explaining most of what we see every day in nature." - Stephen Wolfram

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, but he beholds the light, and whence it flows, he sees it in his joy; the youth, who daily farther from the east must travel, still is Nature’s priest, and by the vision splendid is on his way attended; at length the man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day." - William Wordsworth

"I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you." - Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright

"We believe that humanity stands at the threshold of its next great leap. However, our success in making this transition depends on our willingness to develop a greater vision and a clearer sense of responsibility for one another. Understanding and articulating the nature and dynamics of consciousness is key to achieving this new vision." - Barbara Fields Bernstein

"We have been forced step by step to forgo a causal description of the behavior of individual atoms in space and time, and to reckon with a free choice on the part of nature between various possibilities." - Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr

"Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down." - Malcolm de Chazal

"A Hopi tradition speaks of a fall from grace in which human beings experience themselves as progressively more separate from earth, animals, and other humans. The return to grace is through reunion. The cause of the fall is ascribed to people's forgetting their true nature and purpose." - Arthur Deikman

"Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of striving to fulfill wishes of the material kind." - Albert Einstein

"Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty." - Albert Einstein

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." -

"Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what Is stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless." -

"Nature takes away any faculty that is not used." -

"Man everywhere is dangerously unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble." -

"Nature gave men two ends - one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most." - George Ross Kirkpatrick

"I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health, one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit... Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were - pain which takes its time - only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium - things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better," but I know that it makes us more profound." -

"If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day." - Alex Noble

"We have to make sure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren." - Mike Pence, formally Michael Richard "Mike" Pence