Great Throughts Treasury

"The mystic can live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heartbeats and those of the universe."

"The mind celebrates a little triumph every time it can formulate a truth."

"The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad."

"The working of great institutions is mainly the result of... routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistakes. Only a small fraction is thought."

"To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful."

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."

"The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence."

"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic."

"To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. To know a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To first for a reason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior despises."

"Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition."

"Truth is a dream unless my dream is true."

"Two protecting deities, indeed, like two sober friends supporting a drunkard, flank human folly and keep it within bounds. One of these deities is Punishment and the other Agreement."

"What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves."

"Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it."

"What we call the contagious force of an idea is the force of the people who have embraced it."

"A dramatic centre of action and passion… utterly unlike what in modern philosophy we call consciousness. The soul causes the body to grow, to assume its ancestral shape, to develop all its ancestral instincts, to wake and to sleep by turns… and at the same time determines the responses that the living body shall make to the world."

"Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of good."

"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."

"Every person in the world is better than someone else. And not as good as some one else."

"Insofar as it knows the eternity of truth and is absorbed into it, the mind lives in that eternity. In caring only for the eternal, it has ceased to care for that part of itself which can die."

"Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny."

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."

"Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions."

"Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods."

"Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure."

"Philosophy is a steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth."

"Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is a desperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of one’s powers."

"Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination."

"Sanity is a madness put to good use."

"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect."

"The problem is how to get experience out of education."

"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."

"The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, make it alike impressive. If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is that spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical and dull."

"The life of reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but the expression of man alone."

"There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural. Its existence seems to me decidedly probable."

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"This religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning."

"Happiness is the only sanction in life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

"Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go for a walk alone, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions."

"We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness…. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience."

"Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be."

"What is life, but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world."

"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms."

"Man is not made to understand life, but to live it."

"With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me. "

"Not human art, but living gods alone Can fashion beauties that by changing live,-- Her buds to spring, his fruits to autumn give, To earth her fountains in her heart of stone; But these in their begetting are o'erthrown, Nor may the sentenced minutes find reprieve; And summer in the blush of joy must grieve To shed his flaunting crown of petals blown. We to our works may not impart our breath, Nor them with shifting light of life array; We show but what one happy moment saith; Yet may our hands immortalize the day When life was sweet, and save from utter death The sacred past that should not pass away. "

"A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths."

"A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud."

"A Californian who I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are. Certainly very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion the man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the center and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert."