Great Throughts Treasury

"Dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side of greed and courage in the brute."

"Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself."

"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."

"Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one."

"England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge."

"England is not the best possible world but it is the best actual country, and a great rest after America."

"Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions. Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one."

"Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."

"Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armor and keeps a fool at court."

"Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility."

"Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things."

"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."

"Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them."

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit"

"Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention."

"For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned."

"Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes."

"For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity."

"For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep."

"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better."

"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is."

"Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors."

"Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment."

"God is a name the world gives to the devil when he is victorious."

"Happiness is impossible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, and fear."

"Greatness is spontaneous."

"Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves."

"He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the delirium of mankind."

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."

"He gave the world another world."

"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. . . . What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion."

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumor; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

"I am worse than an arm-chair philosopher: I am a poet in slippers."

"I am not indifferent, and I am not well informed: whereas a philosopher should be well informed and dispassionate."

"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."

"I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism."

"I have always liked understanding views with which I did not agree—how else could one like the study of philosophy?"

"I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish."

"I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us? the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untraveled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion."

"I wish to mourn perpetually the absence of what I love or might love. Isn't that what religious people call the love of God?"

"I leave you but the sound of many a word in mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me."

"I suppose people aren't ashamed of doing or feeling anything, no matter what, if only they can do it together. And sometimes two people are enough."

"I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty."

"If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them."

"If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved."

"If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics."

"If you bravely make the best of a crazy world, eternity is full of champions that will defend you."

"If one is the master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time insight into and understanding of many things."