Great Throughts Treasury

"It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination."

"It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendor of life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy."

"It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great."

"It was thus at a late stage of human history, though still so primitive as to be prehistoric, that organized warfare developed. At the dawn of history war abounded."

"Jealousy that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive."

"It was taken for granted at that time that the female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain amount of enjoyment in the use of it."

"It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else."

"It was based on the moral assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth century that this state of things reached its full development."

"Lovers in their play - when they have been liberated from the traditions which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in love - are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the body and of the soul."

"Man lives by imagination"

"Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom."

"Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide."

"No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace."

"No faith is our own that we have not arduously won."

"o be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men."

"Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing."

"One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take."

"Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself."

"Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex."

"Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments."

"Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher's credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy."

"Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction."

"So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces."

"The art of living lies in a fine mingling of holding on and letting go."

"The absence of a flaw in beauty is itself a flaw."

"The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite."

"The claim made in primitive societies that warfare is necessary to the maintenance of virility and courage, a claim so fully admitted that only the youth furnished with trophies of heads or scalps can hope to become an accepted lover, is out of date in civilization. For under civilized conditions there are hundreds of avocations which furnish exactly the same conditions as warfare for the cultivation of all the manly virtues of enterprise and courage and endurance, physical or moral."

"The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product."

"The family has been regarded as a small State of which the husband and father is head."

"The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organization that make it enjoyable."

"The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship."

"The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together."

"The erotic idea, in its deeper sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind."

"The first definition of the sexual impulse we meet with is that which regards it as an impulse of evacuation. The psychological element is thus reduced to a minimum."

"The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity."

"The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work, and, notably, stimulate the glandular system."

"The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought."

"The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship."

"The largely objective character of beauty is further indicated by the fact that to a considerable extent beauty is the expression of health. A well and harmoniously developed body, tense muscles, an elastic and finely toned skin, bright eyes, grace and animation of carriage- all these things which are essential to beauty are the conditions of health."

"The mitigating influence of religion over warfare has long ceased to be exercised, for the international Catholic Church no longer possesses the power to exert such influence, while the national Protestant churches are just as bellicose as their flacks. Now we see the influence of morality over warfare similarly tending to disappear."

"The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life."

"The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people."

"The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny."

"The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves."

"The place where optimism flourishes most is in the lunatic asylum."

"The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the actions and the feelings of women."

"The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train"

"The people who embody one of these streams of tradition, basing themselves on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert, that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like other excretions."

"The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear them until they are able to take care of themselves."

"The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps."