Great Throughts Treasury

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. "

"Power without abuse loses its charm. "

"Sometime I think; and sometime I am. "

"The first string comes from God, the rest is up to you. "

"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."

"The object of psychology is to give us a totally different idea of the things we know best. "

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."

"The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen."

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. "

"The term Science should not be given to anything but the aggregate of the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature."

"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best."

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. "

"The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability."

"There are however several publics; amongst whom it is not impossible to find some people who do not conceive of pleasure without pain, who do not like to enjoy themselves without paying, and who are not happy if their happiness is not in some part their own contrivance through which they wish to realize what it costs them. "

"To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means."

"There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography. "

"Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder."

"To live means to lack something at every moment "

"What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinged what we think of ourselves. "

"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."

"What is more important than the meal? Doesn’t the least observant man-about-town look upon the implementation and ritual progress of a meal as a liturgical prescription? Isn’t all of civilization apparent in these careful preparations, which consecrate the spirit’s triumph over a raging appetite? "

"We are enriched by our reciprocate differences."

"Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious."

"Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo."

"A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone."

"A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key."

"In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry."

"Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows."

"A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas."

"A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it?i.e. gives it to the public."

"A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will."

"A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations."

"An alone man is always badly accompanied."

"Admirable man, who know teeth by dreams, think you that all those of philosophers are decayed?"

"An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants."

"Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon -- and falsehood, which is her armor."

"Because I've lived to expect,"

"As for the world, all reality has no other excuse for existence except to offer the poet the chance to play a sublime match against it -- a match that is list in advance."

"Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself."

"Enter at people to confuse their ideas to their surprise be surprised at what they do, what they think, and they have never designed different is, through the real or feigned ingenuousness give any sense of relativity of a civilization, a usual confidence in the established order."

"Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish."

"For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know."

"But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind."

"Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph."

"By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death."

"Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance."

"Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects."

"But Socrates cannot but have been meditating upon something?... Can he ever remain solitary with himself -- and silent to his very soul!"

"For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli."

"Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest."