Great Throughts Treasury

"He who sets out in search of Truth must leave Superstition forever and wander down into the land of Absolute Negation and Denial. He must then go… where the mountains of Stern Reality will rise before him. Beyond them lies Truth."

"Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn."

"There was never a great man who had not a great mother."

"I have no conscience, none, but I would not like to bring a soul into this world. When it sinned and when it suffered something like a dead hand would fall on me, -- ''You did it, you, for your own pleasure you created this thing! See your work!'' If it lived to be eighty it would always hang like a millstone round my neck, have the right to demand good from me, and curse me for its sorrow. A parent is only like to God: if his work turns out bad so much the worse for him; he dare not wash his hands of it. Time and years can never bring the day when you can say to your child, ''Soul, what have I to do with you?""

"When the curtain falls no one is ready."

"There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance."

"A little crying, a little flattery, a little self-humiliation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then one of the men will say: Come on, be my wife!"

"An ox at the roadside, when it is dying of hunger and thirst, does not lie down; it walks up and down, up and down, seeking - it knows not what - but it does not lie down."

"A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say .Come, be my wife! With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world."

"And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own, 'I see the vision of a poor weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short; and, in the end, it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that' - she moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead - 'happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt - it loved"

"And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again."

"And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable - all is meaningful; nothing is small - all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, no too small."

"Finishing schools are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, Into how little space a human being can be crushed I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move."

"By our errors we see deeper into life."

"From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of the heart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows on a sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn, depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things; but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers can alter. To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not; to travel on a Sunday or not. Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is ? the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?"

"How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper."

"Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour."

"I object to anything that divides the two sexes. My main point is this: Human development has now reached a point at which sexual difference has become a thing of altogether minor importance. We make too much of it; we are men and women in the second place; human beings in the first."

"I think if I were dying and I heard of an act of injustice, it would start me up to a moment's life again."

"I think,' said Lyndall, 'that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one's caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms."

"I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us."

"If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa."

"Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather, Abraham, introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of Heaven. They brought the world the Ten Commandments, which many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters. They aggravated mankind by building, in the wink of an eye, a democratic State which others were not able to create in even hundreds of years. They built living monuments such as the duty to be holy and the privilege to serve one?s fellow men. They had their hands in every human progressive endeavor, whether in science, medicine, psychology or any other discipline, while totally out of proportion to their actual numbers. They gave the world the Bible and even their ?savior.? Jews taught the world not to accept the world as it is, but to transform it, yet only a few nations wanted to listen. Moreover, the Jews introduced the world to one God, yet only a minority wanted to draw the moral consequences. So the nations of the world realize that they would have been lost without the Jews? And while their subconscious tries to remind them of how much of Western civilization is framed in terms of concepts first articulated by the Jews, they do anything to suppress it. They deny that Jews remind them of a higher purpose of life and the need to be honorable, and do anything to escape its consequences? It is simply too much to handle for them, too embarrassing to admit, and above all, too difficult to live by. So the nations of the world decided once again to go out of ?their? way in order to find a stick to hit the Jews. The goal: to prove that Jews are as immoral and guilty of massacre and genocide as some of they themselves are. All this in order to hide and justify their own failure to even protest when six million Jews were brought to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Dachau; so as to wipe out the moral conscience of which the Jews remind them, and they found a stick. Nothing could be more gratifying for them than to find the Jews in a struggle with another people (who are completely terrorized by their own leaders) against whom the Jews, against their best wishes, have to defend themselves in order to survive. With great satisfaction, the world allows and initiates the rewriting of history so as to fuel the rage of yet another people against the Jews. This in spite of the fact that the nations understand very well that peace between the parties could have come a long time ago, if only the Jews would have had a fair chance. Instead, they happily jumped on the wagon of hate so as to justify their jealousy of the Jews and their incompetence to deal with their own moral issues. When Jews look at the bizarre play taking place in The Hague , they can only smile as this artificial game once more proves how the world paradoxically admits the Jews? uniqueness. It is in their need to undermine the Jews that they actually raise them. The study of history of Europe during the past centuries teaches us one uniform lesson: That the nations which received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered; and that the nations that have tortured and oppressed them have written out their own curse."

"If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?"

"If you have a deadly fruit to give, it will not grow sweeter by keeping."

"Make your thought look anything but imbecile fools."

"Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it - but there is."

"It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well... than to kill ten thousand."

"No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted."

"No woman has the right to marry a man if she has to bend herself out of shape for him. She might wish to, but she could never be to him with all her passionate endeavor what the other woman could be to him without trying. Character will dominate overall and will come out at last."

"Now we have no God. We have had two the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of -- the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God."

"My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad."

"Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist."

"Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it."

"Of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, Into how little space a human being can be crushed? I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move there ? wide room. A woman who has been for many years at one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she dies."

"Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death."

"The secret of success is concentration, wherever there has been a great life, or a great work, that has gone before. Taste everything a little, look at everything a little; but live for one thing."

"So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth."

"The surest sign of fitness is success."

"Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act."

"Sin looks much more terrible to those who look at it than to those who do it."

"There are some wiser in their sleeping than in their waking."

"The troubles of the young are soon over they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off . . . you will see the scar there still."

"There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them."

"There is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those that are sad."

"They talk of genius--it is nothing but this, that a man knows what he can do best, and does it, and nothing else."

"We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest ? blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says ? Work; and to us it says ? Seem! To you it says ? As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labor is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says ? Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labor. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women."

"This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand."

"Troubles of the young are soon over."

"There is nothing ridiculous in love."