Great Throughts Treasury

"Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood."

"Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth."

"My desire for wisdom, not for the exercise of the will. The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the large man who can see."

"Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so."

"Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal. We know him only as what we call civilization has tamed and trained him; hence we are alarmed by the occasional breaking out of his true nature. But whenever the locks and chains of law and order are cast off, and anarchy comes in, he shows himself for what he really is."

"Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within."

"Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect."

"Our hesitation before such a colossal thought will perhaps be diminished by the recollection... that the ultimate dreamer of the vast life-dream is finally, in a certain sense, but one, namely the Will to Live, and that the multiplicity of appearances follows from the conditioning effects of time and space [the morphogenetic field whereby the Will to Live assumes forms]. It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything links and accords with everything else."

"One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him. The disposition of the first is subjective, of the second objective. The one is, in the whole of his existence, more in the nature of an idea which is merely presented, the other more of the being who presents it."

"Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature."

"Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face."

"The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrine in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as these doctrines, you have the great mischief of a continual fraud."

"The capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge... A degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is."

"The majority of men...are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority."

"The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will."

"To the man who studies to gain a thorough insight into science, books and study are merely the steps of the ladder by which he climbs to the summit; as soon as a step has been advanced he leaves it behind. The majority of mankind, however, who study to fill their memory with facts do not use the steps of the ladder to mount upward, but take them off and lay them on their shoulders in order that they may take them along, delighting in the weight of the burden they are carrying. They ever remain below because they carry what should carry them."

"The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real object."

"Time is that in which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will to live - the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable - has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess."

"Unrest is the mark of existence."

"The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom."

"You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind."

"The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see."

"Acute illnesses are, with a few exceptions, nothing other than curative processes instituted by nature itself to remedy some disorder in the organism."

"Asceticism is the denial of the will to live."

"Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on man’s rights; he will rather have regard for everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness."

"All religions promise a reward… for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding."

"Apart from man, no being wonders at its own existence."

"Instead of always thinking about our plans and anxiously looking to the future, or giving ourselves up to regret for the past, we should never forget that the present is the only reality, the only certainty; the future almost always turns out contrary to our expectations; the past, too, was very different from what we suppose it to have been."

"Care should be taken not to build the happiness of life upon a broad foundation -- which means not to require a great many things in order to be happy. Happiness on such a foundation is the most easily undermined. It offers many more opportunities for accidents; and accidents are always happening."

"Happiness consists in a frequent repetition of pleasure."

"Journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark."

"Human life must be some kind of mistake… Existence has no real value in itself."

"It is by virtue of his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, like the brute, but looks about him and considers his past and the future."

"Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete, devotes his heart entirely to money."

"Peace, Rest and Bliss dwell only where there is no where and no when."

"The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings... The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it."

"Poverty and slavery are… only two forms of – one might almost say two words for – the same thing, the essence of which is that a man’s energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others; the outcome being partly that he is overloaded with work, partly that his needs are very inadequately met."

"Mystery is in reality only a theological term for religious allegory. All religions have their mysteries. Properly speaking, a mystery is a dogma which is plainly absurd, but which, nevertheless conceals in itself a lofty truth."

"Mystery is not the denial of reason but its honest confirmation: reason, indeed, leaves inevitability to mystery… mystery and reality are the two halves of the same sphere."

"Religion is the metaphysics of the masses."

"The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind… it is the will which… gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony."

"The power by virtue of which Christianity was able to overcome first Judaism, and then the heathenism of Greece and Rome, lies solely on its pessimism, in the confession that our state is both exceedingly wretched and sinful, while Judaism and heathenism were both optimistic."

"There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life."

"Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees."

"Time is that which in all things passes away; it is from the form under which the will to live has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is the agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose all value."

"True salvation, deliverance from life and suffering, cannot be imagined without complete denial of the will."

"Without a proper amount of daily exercise no one can remain healthy."

"To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence."

"Compassion is the basis for morality."

"Compared with the short span of time they live, men of great intellect are like huge buildings, standing on a small plot of ground. The size of the building cannot be seen by anyone, just in front of it; nor, for an analogous reason, can the greatness of a genius be estimated while he lives. But when a century has passed, the world recognizes it and wishes him back again."