Great Throughts Treasury

"Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue."

"Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it."

"War is not ‘the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you."

"We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world."

"We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments."

"We all know that the 'divine glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility — in other people."

"We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty."

"We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners."

"We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance."

"We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear."

"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

"We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent molded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul."

"We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end."

"We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all."

"We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening."

"We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world."

"We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God."

"We have come to the wrong star... That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. The true happiness is that we don't fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way."

"We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera."

"We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character."

"We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper."

"We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening."

"We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves."

"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor."

"We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot."

"We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity."

"We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology."

"We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection."

"We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations."

"We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: The golden rule is that there is no golden rule. We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters — except everything."

"We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross."

"What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read."

"What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place."

"What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?"

"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism."

"What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."

"What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business."

"What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity."

"What though they come with scroll and pen, and grave as a shaven clerk, by this sign you shall know them, that they ruin and make dark."

"What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another."

"What we call personality... has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd... Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness."

"What we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent."

"What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed."

"Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being."

"Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means."

"When [a politician] is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it. In short, when he is impotent he proves to us that the thing is easy; and when he is omnipotent he proves that it is impossible."

"When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it."

"When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims."

"When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things."

"When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them."