Great Throughts Treasury

"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

"A dream is the bearer of a new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope. "

"During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism. "

"Commitment means that it is possible 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. "

"There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls."

"And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days."

"At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live"

"He who fears is literally delivered to destruction. "

"Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace."

"Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them."

"There must be for me a deep sense of relatedness to God. This relatedness is the way by which there shall open for me more and more springs of energy and power, which will enable me to thread life’s mysteries with life’s clue. I shall not waste any effort trying to reduce God to my particular logic. Here in the quietness, I shall give myself in love to God. "

"To speak of the love for humanity is meaningless. There is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need. As an abstract, it has no reality whatsoever."