Great Throughts Treasury

"It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete."

"All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body."

"Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences. A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences."

"We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought."

"Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn't really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible mechanisms and visible answers . The placebo, then, is an emissary between the will to live and the body."

"The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him. "

"We have learned to live in a world of mistakes and defective products as if they were necessary to life. It is time to adopt a new philosophy in America."

"A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences."

"A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together."

"All things are possible once enough human beings realize that the whole of the human future is at stake"

"For every low there is an equal but opposite high."

"Don't deny the diagnosis. Try to defy the verdict."

"Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths."

"Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors."

"He who keeps his cool best wins."

"Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country."

"Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country."

"Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic."

"Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood."

"Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour."

"Hope, faith, love and a strong will to live offer no promise of immortality, only proof of our uniqueness and human beings and the opportunity to experience full growth even under the grimmest circumstances. Far more real than the ticking of time is the way we open up the minutes and invest them with meaning. Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth."

"I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going."

"I have learned never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate -- even when prospects seem most wretched. The life force may be the least understood force on earth. Norman Cousins (in his; Anatomy of an Illness)"

"Humanity today is not safe in the presence of humanity. The old cannibalism has given way to anonymous action in which the killer and the killed do not know each other, and in which,indeed, the very fact of mass death has the effect of making mass killing less reprehensible than the death of a single individual. In short, we have evolved in every respect except our ability to protect ourselves against human intelligence. Our knowledge is vast but does not embrace the workings of peace. . . . We study history, philosophy, religions, languages, literature, art, architecture, political science . . . anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, sanitation . . . chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics. But we have yet to make peace basic to our education. The most important subject in the world is hardly taught at all. In the spirit of this passage, the editor has taken the liberty of editing Mr. Cousins' language to make it more gender inclusive."

"It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing."

"If there is a conflict between the security of the sovereign state and the security of the human commonwealth, the human commonwealth comes first. If there is a conflict between the well-being of the nation and the well-being of humanity, the well-being of humanity comes first. If there is a conflict between the needs of this generation and the needs of all later generations, the needs of the later generations come first. If there is a conflict between public edict and private conscience, private conscience comes first. If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first."

"If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it."

"Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations."

"No one really knows enough to be a pessimist."

"Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding."

"People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time"

"My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason."

"Optimism doesn?t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time."

"Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it."

"Pessimism operates in a narrowed field of vision that fails to take into account the possibilities at the outer edges of experience."

"Some people don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being."

"People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams."

"Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations-plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology."

"Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep"

"The essence of man is imperfection."

"The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home."

"The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical."

"The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force."

"The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us"

"The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

"The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life."

"The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war."

"The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible."

"The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nonetheless lethal for being legal. Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time."

"The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose."