Great Throughts Treasury

"The mark of the immature person is that they want to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature person is that they want to live humbly for one" - J.D. Salinger, fully Jerome David Salinger

"The soul is master of every kind of fortune: itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery." - Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL

"The mark of the immature person is that they want to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature person is that they want to live humbly for one." -

"Ignorance alone is the prime cause of all misery." - Chandrasekhara Bharati III, born Narasimha Swamigal

"[Idolatry as] the moments when we forget who we really are and instead of remembering that we are sparks of the Divine, we start giving up our power to a guru, an ideology, a romantic obsession, a stressful job that begins to define us, or an unhealthy habit we think we can’t live without. Even is we no longer build or worship physical idols like in ancient times, we have modern-day addictions and pressures that cause us to forget that our purpose here is to be a vehicle for Divine energies." - Ted Falcon

"The goal itself cannot be the meaning. It might be a potential cause or source of meaning… the cause of happiness is not what happiness consists in." - Garrett Thomson

"Commitment means that it is impossible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies." -

"No disease can enter into or take hold of our bodies unless it finds therein something corresponding to itself which makes it possible. And in the same way, no evil or undesirable condition of any kind can come into our lives unless there is already in them that which invites it and so makes it possible for it to come. the sooner we begin to look within ourselves for the cause of whatever comes to us, the better it will be, for so much sooner will we begin to make conditions within ourselves such that only good may enter." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Forget your enemies. It's your friends you frustrate that cause all the problems." - Michael J. Tucker

"Above the senses is the mind. Above the mind is the intellect. Above the intellect is the ego. Above the ego is the unmanifested seed, the Primal Cause. And verily beyond the unmanifested seed is the self, the unconditioned Knowing whom one attains to freedom and achieves immortality." - Katha Upanishad

"Life is not a process of mere predictable cause and effect. Both cause and effect are aspects of something greater than either." - Laurens van der Post, fully Sir Laurens Jan van der Post

"The real cause for dread is not a machine turned human, but a human turned machine." -

"Since half the human beings who apply to a doctor for care arrive in the waiting room with a psychological cause for their physical complaint, it is necessary only to convince them that the treatment is going to succeed for it to do so." -

"No one but myself can be blamed for my fall. I have been my own greatest enemy - the cause of my own disastrous fate." -

"Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of a cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause." -

"A Hopi tradition speaks of a fall from grace in which human beings experience themselves as progressively more separate from earth, animals, and other humans. The return to grace is through reunion. The cause of the fall is ascribed to people's forgetting their true nature and purpose." - Arthur Deikman

"It is possible, even probable, that hopelessness among a people can be a far more potent cause of war than greed." -

"A good case can be made for the proposition that, although involved or passionate commitment to some cause or ideal is normally healthy and happiness-producing, devout, pious, or fanatic commitment to the same kind of cause or ideal is potentially pernicious and frequently (though not always) does much more harm than good." - Albert Ellis

"All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms." -

"The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true; It does create a sense of comradeship, which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War, for those who enter into combat, has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the "lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning." - Chris Hedges

"It is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began." -

"A day merely survived is no cause for celebration." - Og Mandino

"Why will you take by force what you may obtain by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?... We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in friendly manner... I am not so simple as not to know it is better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and being their friend, trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them... Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may die in the same manner." - Powhatan, proper name was Wahunsenacawh, also spelled Wahunsonacock NULL

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is he wants to live humbly for one." -

"Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety." - Aesop NULL

"Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety." -

"Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety." -

"In the spiritual life, every cause is also an effect, and every effect is at the same time a cause." -

"In the spiritual life, every cause is also an effect, and every effect is at the same time a cause." -

"In the spiritual life, every cause is also an effect, and every effect is at the same time a cause." -

"The real cause, the effective one that makes men lose power is that they have become unworthy to exercise it." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"Love is a force... It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow

"Love is a force… It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow

"Directions cause destinations." - Anthony "Tony" Robbins

"Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruelest of sufferings. For, not withstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The cause of the breakdowns of civilizations is not to be found in loss of command over the human environment, as measured by the encroachment of alien human forces... The most that an alien enemy has achieved has been to give an expiring suicide his coup de grace." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real object." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause." - Author Unknown NULL

"Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum

"There is no free will in the human mind: it is moved to this or that volition by some cause, and that cause has been determined by some other cause, and so on infinitely." -

"Children learn at their own pace, and it is a mistake to try to force them. The great incentive to effort, all through life, is experience of success after initial difficulties. The difficulties must not be so great as to cause discouragement, or so small as not to stimulate effort. From birth to death, this is a fundamental principle. It is by what we do ourselves that we learn." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Everything on earth gives cause for fear, and the only freedom from fear is to be found in the renunciation of all desire." - Bhartrihari NULL

"The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason." - Blaise Pascal

"If our condition were truly happy, we should not need to divert ourselves from it. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room." - Blaise Pascal

"The primary cause of success in life is the ability to set and achieve goals. That’s why the people who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do. You either work to achieve your own goals or you work to achieve someone else’s." - Brian Tracy

"We may neglect the wrongs which we receive, but be careful to rectify those which we are the cause of to others." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

"Few things are more agreeable to self-love than revenge, and yet no cause so effectually restrains us from revenge as self-love. And this paradox naturally suggests another; that the strength of the community is not infrequently built upon the weakness of those individuals that compose it." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Augur said, " Give me neither poverty or riches"' and this will ever be the prayer of the wise. Our incomes should be like our shoes: if too small, they will gall and pinch us, but if too large, they will cause us to stumble and to trip. But wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much, but wants more." - Charles Caleb Colton

"From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb, which says, "That the devil tempts all other men, but the idle men tempt the devil."" - Charles Caleb Colton