Great Throughts Treasury

"You build on cost and borrow on value."

""Did you have a happy childhood?" is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being."

"The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The rules of navigation never navigated a ship; the rules of architecture never built a house."

"There is nothing more ridiculous than to imagine that any motion or modification of matter should produce thought."

"If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception."

"Perception, as we here understand it, hath always an object distinct from the at by which it is perceived; an object which may exist whether it be perceived or not. I perceive a tree that grows before my window; there is here an object which is perceived, and an act of the mind by which it is perceived; and these two are not only distinguishable, but they are extremely unlike in their natures."

"If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides."

"I did not concentrate on risk management, and I did not realize the change in the marketplace that came about with the Gulf war. Psychologically, a lot of things I should have done I didn't, because I knew that when this big tenant -- Barclays Bank -- moved in, Canary Wharf would have been acclaimed as the greatest success of the century. In the end, the blame is all mine. The mistakes were not in real estate but in our financings of other things, like Abitibi-Price ((a huge paper products manufacturer)) and Gulf Canada Resources ((an oil and gas company)), that we did during an inflationary period.'"