Great Throughts Treasury

"In a moving world re-adaptation is the price of longevity."

"In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality...The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral."

"In fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."

"In Greece wise men speak and fools decide."

"In order to discern this healthy life, for the soul no less than for the body, not much learning is required; only a little experience, a little reflection, and a little candor."

"In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: hit the line hard."

"In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess."

"In love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognized and obeyed."

"In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a fig-leaf."

"In the end every philosopher has to walk alone."

"In those universities where philosophical controversy is rife, [philosophy's] traditional and scholastic character is no less obvious; it lives less on meditation than on debate, and turns on proofs, objects, paradoxes, or expedients for seeming to re-establish everything that had come to seem clearly false, by some ingenious change of front or some twist of dialectic."

"In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavor."

"Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion."

"In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour."

"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."

"Interest in the changing seasons is a much happier state of mind than being hopelessly in love with spring."

"Intoxication is a sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat fooled by yesterday's joys and somewhat lost in to-day's vacancy."

"It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true."

"Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are."

"It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs."

"It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to."

"It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well."

"It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss."

"It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy."

"It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig."

"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."

"It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger."

"It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases."

"It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travelers or philosophers. ... It is no accident for the soul to be embodied; her very essence is to express and bring to fruition the body's functions and resources. Its instincts make her ideals and its relations her world. A native country is a sort of second body, another enveloping organism to give the will definition. A specific inheritance strengthens the soul."

"It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands."

"It is very hard for philosophers to put on one another's shoes."

"It is wisdom to believe the heart."

"It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas."

"It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur."

"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator."

"It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility."

"It would be so awkward in heaven, after all one had discovered, to have to put on a perfect innocence."

"Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace."

"It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior."

"Life is a succession of second bests."

"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."

"Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside."

"Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."

"Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine."

"Logic is a refined form of grammar."

"Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right."

"Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived."

"Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any."

"Man has an inexhaustible faculty for lying, especially to himself."

"Man is as full of potential as he is of importance."