Great Throughts Treasury

"He is free who knows how to keep in his hands the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power."

"Action is the music of our life. Like music, it starts from a pause of leisure, a silence of activity which our initiative attacks; then it develops according to its inner logic, passes its climax, seeks its cadence, ends, and restores silence, leisure again. Action and leisure are thus interdependent; echoing and recalling each other, so that action enlivens leisure with its memories and anticipations, and leisure expands and raises action beyond its mere immediate self and gives it a permanent meaning."

"Art is the conveyance of spirit by means of matter."

"Circumstances are the seeds of literature."

"Considering how bad men are, it is wonderful how well they behave."

"First, the sweetheart of the nation, then her aunt, woman governs American because America is a land where boys refuse to grow up."

"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power."

"If man is but a biological organism and biology itself may be reduced to a set of physical and chemical laws, it should be possible to build up a biological science, a kind of biological mechanics, whose laws would rule the working and repair of the several pieces of the human machine. In such a case, there would be a 'medicine' or 'medical science'; and the doctor's task would consist in acquiring and maintaining an adequate knowledge of the laws of such a science and applying them so to speak in a uniform and automatic way, with hardly any meddling from his own personal criterion."

"If, on the contrary, man is above all an eminently living being, every specimen of which is ever new and original, a being strongly influenced by ultra-physical faculties -- spirit, intellect, emotions -- if, in one word, man is a whole that can only be ruled from its own center, medicine, then, will be but an art or a craft to be applied in each case to a concrete individual. And then, rather than 'medicine', there will be medicine-men."

"Literature is an art, and the essence of all art is mood."

"Love has its roots in sex, but its foliage and flowers are in the pure light of spirit."

"My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust."

"No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies."

"The best pastimes for a true enjoyer of leisure who has to stay at home . . . reading by the fireside. . . . Listening to music."

"The ideal holiday for the truly active man is one doing nothing in beautiful surroundings . . . and the ideal exercise for this best form of leisure is the old, natural, spontaneous movement of the body -- the walk."

"The press freedom depends almost every other freedom."

"On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfills itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community."

"Sermons seldom convert sinners; they sometimes goad them into more sin."

"The Anglo-Saxon conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't; it just keeps you from enjoying it."

"To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prison at the pleasure of the Government."

"Truth lies between these two poles, but gravitates definitely towards the second."

"We do not distrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we distrust each other."

"The criminal excesses of unlimited capitalistic liberty had soon been checked thanks to the unlimited liberty of the press."

"The world has reached such a degree of interdependence... that international cooperation has become essential... the only self-supporting region of the world is the whole world... Only one opinion and only one market cover the face of the earth."

"The three creative prototypes, the scientist, the artist, and the saint, know instinctively, without the help of any mere philosopher, that each must obey an absolute rule of conduct. Three words established and hallowed by usage express the divinities, the values, the supreme aims served respectively by these three kinds of men with an undivided loyalty: truth for the scientist; beauty for the artist; goodness for the saint. The discussion on what these words mean will never end. We must be content with taking note of their clarity as symbols, and of the singular force which animates them and makes of them powerful poles of attraction."

"The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting."

"Who can tell where sincerity merges with humility, and where it folds itself over and becomes hypocrisy, and where it touches self-righteousness."