Great Throughts Treasury

"A country without a memory is a country of madmen."

"A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel."

"A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity."

"A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul."

"A man's hatred of his own condition no more helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them."

"A need is not a good. It denotes a condition to be fulfilled before some natural virtue can be exercised and some true good thereby attained. To feel needs is to feel separated from the good by some unfulfilled prerequisite to possessing it."

"A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present."

"A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity."

"A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world."

"A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it."

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."

"All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg."

"Across a void of mystery and dread."

"An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the creative forces of nature."

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

"All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us."

"America is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado. Although it has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves, there is no country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions."

"All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato."

"America is a young country with an old mentality."

"American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."

"America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences."

"An artist may visit a museum, but only a pedant can live there."

"An ideal out of relation to the actual demands of living beings is so far from being an ideal that it is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be not the acme but the atrophy of moral endeavor."

"An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion that showed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood."

"And what is philosophy, as the governance and appreciation of life, except religion liberated from groundless fear or anxiety that is to say from superstition, and also from rage at honest illusions?"

"And what more can you expect a philosopher to prove except that the views he has adopted are radically and eternally impossible? If every philosopher had done that in the past, we should now be almost out of the wood."

"As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends."

"Art, like life, should be free, since both are experimental."

"Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age."

"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said."

"Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience — the union of life and peace."

"As man is now constituted, to be brief is almost a condition of being inspired."

"Beauty is objectified pleasure."

"Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine."

"Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind."

"Belief in a thousand hells and heavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the passionate from passion."

"Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him."

"Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles."

"Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel."

"Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in its pregnant sense, impossible."

"But since, as a matter of fact, birth and death, actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie."

"By essence I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence."

"By nature's kindly disposition most questions which are beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all."

"Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods."

"Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or an idea, but is really some stronger material force."

"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."

"Columbus found a world, and had no chart, save one that faith deciphered in the skies."

"Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men."

"Depression is rage spread thin."

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."