Great Throughts Treasury

"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."

"The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it."

"The most amazing thing about the world is that we understand it."

"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe."

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."

"The most important question a person can ask is, "

"The most practical solution is a good theory."

"The note of the science without religion is lame, and religion is a religion without science is blind."

"The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual."

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

"The only thing certain in this world is uncertainty."

"The only thing that gets in the way of my learning is my education."

"The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library."

"The other is as though everything is a miracle."

"The perfection of means and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem."

"The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking."

"The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket."

"The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province."

"The power of faith is demonized enemies of the truth."

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them."

"The question that often drives me hazy, am I or the others crazy?"

"The rational knowledge is the way of spiritual progress, which is what Yun man from the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith."

"The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling."

"The religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It will transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology."

"The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another."

"The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!"

"The science, contrary to popular opinion, God does not eliminate the physical must be pursued even theological purpose, since it must present itself not only to know how nature, but also to know why nature is so and not a ' otherwise, with the intention of coming to understand if God had other choices before him when he created the world. "

"The scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."

"The search for truth implies a duty. One must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The sign of true intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

"The situation of children left strange land we do! Each of us came here as a short visit. I do not know what to do, but sometimes we feel we believe that. Song, from daily life that does not go deeper, we know that we are here for other people - first of all because the people of our own happiness depends entirely on the smile and calm their next one is because many people do not know that their fate was connected by strings of compassion. "

"The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart."

"The strength of America's superior military receives a responsibility to be morally superior nation."

"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."

"The strongest force in the universe is Compound Interest."

"The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience"

"The Three Rules of Work: 1. Out of clutter, find simplicity. 2. From discord, find harmony. 3. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity."

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives."

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

"The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time."

"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

"The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat."

"The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, and religious scripture a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this."

"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."

"The world is not threatened by people who are evil, but of those who allow evil."

"The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking."

"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."