Great Throughts Treasury

"Without love, immortality would be frightful and horrible."

"I once counseled a man in despair to do what I myself did in a similar circumstances: to live for short terms. Come, I said to myself at that time, at any rate you can bear it for a quarter of an hour."

"A curse on every wish that blurs the sight, paralyzes the tongue, cramps the hand, and prevents the truth being seen, said, and written."

"One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography."

"The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror."

"The one sure means of dealing with boredom is to care for someone else, to do something kind and good."

"All beauty of this world is wet with the dew of tears."

"At any rate, you can bear it for a quarter of an hour!"

"Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue."

"Prussian idealism took the heart of flesh and blood from the German and in its place gave him one of iron and paper."

"Joy untouched by thankfulness is always suspect."

"The first law is that no man, and therefore no human type, is outside the universally human. There is no human note or sound or merest whisper or simple cry but may be brought within the unity of a single primordial symphony. Man when solitary is not man, nor can he by himself make unity out of his diversity. The gulfs which separate man from man are innumerable, and even within that first and ultimate natural unity, the family, they may be desperately deep. But however mysterious the grounds for them may be, it is nevertheless within his power to bridge them superficially by a hundred technical means and inwardly to overcome them through heroic love and self-denying sacrifice, through a voluntarily casting of himself into the abyss, and through a grace-given rediscovery there of some yet profounder common ground."

"A writing style that is at once both personal and good is a natural unity of two natures, the nature of the author and the nature of the language in which he writes. Though natural, this unity is often achieved only by great artfulness since these two natures are not identical and their unity is usually only to be achieved through mutual compromises. A butcher of the language can write in a stimulating personal style while a good schoolboy can achieve a good style without betraying anything personal. The great writer, however, is the one in whose style both natures have become one and indeed in such a way that no one is able to prise them apart again."

"The principal cause of the present situation: the falling away from God, disobedience towards God, is of course interwoven with many subsidiary causes. One of these is the mass use and thus misuse of higher education. Newman warned against it. Why, he said, should fathers whose sons are to go into trade or business have their sons taught Latin and Greek? Latin and Greek are a violation of the understanding of the average child, and a torture if the teacher is unreasonable. By far the greater proportion of those of our Fhrers who studied the humanities were below the average as scholars. They are revenging themselves horribly, full of poisonous ressentiment for the drudgery and sweat and the inferiority complex which a too high ideal of education brought upon them."