Great Throughts Treasury

"People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"Find fault with thyself rather than with others." - Tokugawa Ieyasu

"Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness. It has been remarked that transports of intemperate mirth are often no more than flashes from the dark cloud; and that in proportion to the violence of the effulgence is the succeeding gloom. Levity may be the forced production of folly or vice; cheerfulness is the natural offspring of wisdom and virtue only. The one is an occasional agitation; the other a permanent habit. The one degrades the character; the other is perfectly consistent with the dignity of reason, and the steady and manly spirit of religion. To aim at a constant succession of high and vivid sensations of pleasure is an idea of happiness perfectly chimerical. Calm and temperate enjoyment is the utmost that is allotted to man. Beyond this we struggle in vain to raise our state; and in fact depress our joys by endeavoring to heighten them. Instead of those fallacious hopes of perpetual festivity with which the world would allure us, religion confers upon us a cheerful tranquillity. Instead of dazzling us with meteors of joy which sparkle and expire, it sheds around us a calm and steady light, more solid, more equal, and more lasting." - Hugh Blair

"By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends." - Hugh Blair

"Dissimulation in youth is the forerunner of perfidy in old age. - It degrades parts and learning, obscures the luster of every accomplishment, and sinks us into contempt. - The path of falsehood is a perplexing maze. - One artifice leads on to another, till, as the intricacy of the labyrinth increases, we are left entangled in our own snare." - Hugh Blair

"If you delay till to-morrow what ought to be done to-day, you overcharge the morrow with a burden which belongs not to it. You load the wheels of time, and prevent it from carrying you along smoothly. He who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows out the plan, carries on a thread which will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of his time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all his affairs. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, all things lie huddled together in one chaos, which admits neither of distribution nor review." - Hugh Blair

"It is pride which plies the world with so much harshness and severity. - We are as rigorous to offences as if we had never offended." - Hugh Blair

"The discipline which corrects the baseness of worldly passions, fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes it with enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity, than all the provisions we can make of the goods of fortune." - Hugh Blair

"The elevated sentiments and high examples which poetry, eloquence, and history are often bringing under our view naturally tend to nourish in our minds public spirit, the love of glory, contempt of external fortune, and the admiration of what is truly illustrious and great." - Hugh Blair

"The roses of pleasure seldom last long enough to adorn the brow of him who plucks them, and they are the only roses which do not retain their sweetness after they have lost their beauty." - Hugh Blair

"This earth is a garden, this life a banquet, and it's time we realized that it was given to all life, animal and man, to enjoy." - Tom Brown, Jr.

"A sudden squawked command caused everyone within earshot to act for a split second as if they were shaking invisible martinis" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines and goddesses into muses. Who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"And from each other look thou lead them thus till o'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep." - William Shakespeare

"Better conquest never canst thou make, than warn thy constant and thy nobler parts against giddy, loose suggestions." - William Shakespeare

"But all the story of the night told over, and their minds transfigur'd so together, more witnesseth than fancy's images, and grows to something of great constancy, but howsoever strange, and admirable. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Can’t help it? Nonsense! What we are is up to us. Our bodies are like gardens and our willpower is like the gardener. Depending on what we plant—weeds or lettuce, or one kind of herb rather than a variety, the garden will either be barren and useless, or rich and productive. If we didn’t have rational minds to counterbalance our emotions and desires, our bodily urges would take over. We’d end up in ridiculous situations. Thankfully, we have reason to cool our raging lusts. In my opinion, what you call love is just an offshoot of lust. Othello, Act I, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare

"Can'st thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude; and, in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Henry IV, Part II, Act iii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Cease thy counsel, for thy words fall into my ears as priceless as water into a sieve." - William Shakespeare

"The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

"Either the nation whose tyrant you would destroy is ripe for the assertion and maintenance of its liberty, or it is not. If it be, the tyrant ought to be deposed with every appearance of publicity. Nothing can be more improper than for an affair, interesting to the general weal, to be conducted as if it were an act of darkness and shame. It is an ill lesson we read to mankind, when a proceeding, built upon the broad basis of general justice, is permitted to shrink from public scrutiny. The pistol and the dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue. To proscribe all violence, and neglect no means of information and impartiality, is the most effectual security we can have, for an issue conformable to reason and truth." - William Godwin

"If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind." - William Godwin

"In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them." - William Godwin

"In cases where everything is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question." - William Godwin

"It is the property of truth to diffuse itself." - William Godwin

"Liberty is one of the best of all sublunary advantages. I would willingly therefore communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little possible violence to, the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed." - William Godwin

"Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species." - William Godwin

"The cause of justice is the cause of humanity. Its advocates should overflow with universal good will. We should love this cause, for it conduces to the general happiness of mankind." - William Godwin

"They who on meare curiositie (where no urgent necessitie requireth) try whether their children may not as birds be nourished without sucking, offend contrary to this dutie of breast feeding and reflect that meanes which God hath ordained as best; and so oppose their shallow wits to his unsearchable wisdom." - William Gouge

"Consciousness is thus, on the one hand, the recognition by the mind or “ego” of its acts and affections:—in other words, the self-affirmation that certain modifications are known by me, and that these modifications are mine." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Ethics is the science of the laws which govern our actions as moral agents." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"If, therefore, mediate knowledge be in propriety a knowledge, consciousness is not co-extensive with knowledge." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Philosophical doubt is not an end, but a mean." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"The word perception is, in the language of philosophers previous to Reid, used in a very extensive signification. By Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibnitz, and others, it is employed in a sense almost as unexclusive as consciousness, in its widest signification. By Reid this word was limited to our faculty acquisitive of knowledge, and to that branch of this faculty whereby, through the senses, we obtain a knowledge of the external world. But his limitation did not stop here. In the act of external perception he distinguished two elements, to which he gave the names of perception and sensation. He ought perhaps to have called these perception proper and sensation proper, when employed in his special meaning." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Very many maintain that all we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown." - William Harvey

"Appearances deceive and this one maxim is a standing rule: men are not what they seem." - William Havard

"I have too deeply read mankind to be amused with friendship; it is a name invented merely to betray credulity; it is intercourse of interest, not of souls." - William Havard

"But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck." - William James

"I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James

"In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse." - William James

"Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked." - William James

"It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical." - William James

"Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him." - William James

"Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do." - William James

"Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false. We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself. First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously? And second, ought we to consider the testimony true? I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: — 1. An uneasiness; and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers." - William James

"Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it." - William James

"The faith circle is so congruous with human nature that the only explanation of the veto that intellectualists pass upon it must be sought in the offensive character to them of the faiths of certain concrete persons." - William James

"The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave." -

"The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's." - William James