Great Throughts Treasury

"There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean."

"Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer?and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another."

"There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts."

"There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance... here is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease."

"There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church's doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals."

"There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men."

"These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind."

"There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice, which is this?to consider chiefly from now onwards those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbors of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea."

"Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory."

"To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist."

"There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same."

"This God-given faculty of Integration is the just and only method of perception we possess: I mean, of perception sufficient to bring us into touch with reality and to recognize a thing. It is our only way of truth. We use it in every moment of our lives, and in proportion to our vigor in using it are we sane. Integration lies at the basis, not only of our recognizing things, but of our judgment upon character and events. Thus, we say that one man "is of good judgment," because he integrates well, though he may not be able to give reasons for his judgment; and another man "of bad judgment," because he integrates badly, although he piles up reasons and calculations over much. Hence, also, we say that good judgment is based upon experience, and hence do we rightly mistrust a man's judgment in practical affairs-----other things being equal-----when he is inexperienced in the particular matter involved, however well he knows the theory of the business."

"To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend, to welcome home mankind's mysterious friend. Wine, true begetter of all arts that be; wine, privilege of the completely free; wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong; wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong, awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!"

"Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing Torture is positively paid to sing."

"Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent."

"Upon being asked by a Reader whether the verses contained in this book were true. And is it True? It is not True. And if it were it wouldn?t do, For people such as me and you Who pretty nearly all day long Are doing something rather wrong. Because if things were really so, You would have perished long ago, And I would not have lived to write The noble lines that meet your sight, Nor B. T. B. survived to draw The nicest things you ever saw. H. B."

"Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, it distribution and exchange were regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in others words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly, in the close connection between wealth and public function."

"We cannot make owners by merely giving men something to own. And, I repeat, whether there be sufficient desire for property left upon which we can work, only experience can decide."

"We may not say to the poor: "You have a right to fight the rich merely because they are rich and in order to make yourselves less poor." We may say: "You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman," but we may not say, "You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less.""

"We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."

"Wealth, for the purposes of economic study, is confined to those values attaching to material objects through the action of man, which values can be exchanged /or other values."

"We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles."

"What is needed is a form of tax which not only spares the small man at the expense of his wealthier rival, but actually subsidizes the small man where subsidy is necessary."

"Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not."

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

"What! Would you slap the Porcupine? Unhappy child ? desist! Alas! That any friend of mine Should turn Tupto-philist."

"When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed, and by whom, one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived at all."

"When people call this beast to mind, they marvel more and more At such a little tail behind, So large a trunk before."

"When well-divided property has disappeared and Capitalism has taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies."

"When they married and gave in marriage they danced at the County Ball and some of them kept a carriage and the flood destroyed them all."

"When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated."

"When the ephemeral vision's lure is past all, all, must face their Passion at the last."

"Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production."

"When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England."

"Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There?s always laughter and good red wine. At least I?ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!"

"While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged"

"Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! See them how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering fellows!"

"Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."

"Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing"

"You shall receive me when the clouds are high with evening and the sheep attain the fold. This is the faith that I have held and hold, and this is that in which I mean to die."

"You are my cat, and I am your human."