Great Throughts Treasury

"A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species."

"A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get."

"A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing."

"Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it."

"Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself."

"All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true."

"An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return."

"As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word."

"As nations improve, so do their gods."

"As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown."

"Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is."

"Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones."

"Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility."

"Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure."

"Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming."

"Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox."

"Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said."

"Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject."

"Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists."

"Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?"

"Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of."

"Delicacy in woman is strength."

"Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates."

"Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride."

"Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner."

"Do not try to show too ingenious to prevent a clever man by nature perceived by chance you really are exactly as you would like him to be."

"Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don’t we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes."

"Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four."

"Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous."

"Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit."

"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."

"Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so."

"Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum."

"Everyone has a moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability."

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together."

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together."

"Everything that matters in life flows through tubes."

"First we have to believe, and then we believe."

"Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?"

"God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs."

"God makes the animals, man makes himself."

"Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste."

"He marveled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were."

"He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way."

"He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp."

"He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards."

"He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals."

"He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage -- he won't encounter many rivals."

"He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection."

"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery."