Great Throughts Treasury

"If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right."

"Have you ever noticed that it is generally the same people who talk about the need for incentive to make a man work successfully, who resent the idea of incentive to make a man think successfully?"

"It may be true that the weak will always be driven to the wall; but it is the task of a just society to see that the wall is climbable."

"Many people feel guilty about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about."

"More trouble is caused in the world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions."

"If you want to know what a man's character is really like... ask him to tell you the living person he most admires – for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature."

"Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong."

"Men may be divided almost any way we please, but I have found the most useful distinction to be made between those who devote their lives to conjugating the verb to be, and those who spend their lives conjugating the verb to have."

"One of the things that is manifestly wrong with our school system is our thoughtless practice of hiring and assigning the youngest and the least experienced teachers for the lowest classes, when it should be quite the other way around."

"Parents should live for their children, but not through them; the parents whose satisfactions are wholly reflections of their children's achievements are as much monsters as the parents who neglect their offspring. Nothing can deform a personality so much as the burden of a love that is utterly self-sacrificing."

"People who are running frantically after happiness remind me of those who are peering everywhere for the spectacles that are perched on their foreheads."

"People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older."

"Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths."

"The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying."

"Those who imagine that the world is against them have generally conspired to make it true."

"The only way to relieve the world's ills is not by understanding each other, but by each one understanding himself; for there can be no genuine rapport between persons who are ignorant of their own deepest motivations and needs."

"We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure."

"The art of living successfully consists of being able to hold two opposite ideas in tension at the same time: first, to make long-term plans as if we were going to live forever; and, second, to conduct ourselves daily as if we were going to die tomorrow."

"The founder of every creed from Jesus Christ to Karl Marx, would be appalled to return to earth and see what has been made of that creed, not by its enemies, but by its most devoted adherents."

"We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying It got lost, and say, I lost it."

"We truly possess only what we are able to renounce; otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions."

"Why do so many people yearn for an eternal life when they don't even know what to do with themselves in this brief one?"

"Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do."

"What the ordinary person means by a 'miracle' is some gross distortion or suspension of the laws of nature... but life itself strikes him as commonplace, when in truth a blade of grass or a neuron in the brain is a greater miracle..."

"You may be certain that when a man begins to call himself a realist, he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of."