Great Throughts Treasury

"Responsibility is the possibility of opportunity culminating in inevitable fulfillment." - Sri Chinmoy, born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose

"The failure of our modern world, with its moral and ethical collapse, may be traced directly to our spiritual ignorance and moral disobedience. The ethical conditions under which we live are disgracefully unsanitary. It is futile to expect peace and goodwill on earth while our homes are infested with the germs of selfishness, irreverence and lust. The world-wide epidemic of hatred, cruelty, murder and war is the inevitable result of our moral and spiritual disobedience. We cannot break the laws of the universe with impunity." - Allen E. Claxton

"Though a taste of pleasure may quicken the relish of life, an unrestrained indulgence leads to inevitable destruction." - Robert Dodsley

"The effects of our actions may be postponed but they are never lost. There is an inevitable reward for good deeds and an inescapable punishment for bad. Meditate upon this truth, and seek always to earn good wages from Destiny." - Wu Ming Fu

"There is an inevitable divergence, attributed to the imperfections of the human mind, between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it." - James William Fulbright

"The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation." -

"In the life of the Indian there was only one inevitable duty - the duty of prayer - the daily recognition of the Unseen and Eternal." -

"Education as a political weapon could not exist if we respected the rights of children. If we respected the rights of children, we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions; but education as a political institution endeavors to form habits and to circumscribe knowledge in such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable." -

"That the individual man should seek to know himself for what he really is and should esteem himself for his true worth make inevitable his desire to be known and esteemed by others according to his merits... God alone is the judge of one’s ultimate worth, and virtue is its own reward." -

"The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top." - Joyce Brothers

"The thing to do when you're impatient is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. It is always on our left, as at arms length. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you have the feeling that your companion is there watching you. How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us? Death is the only wise advise that we have. When we feel that everything is gong wrong, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong. That nothing really matters outside its touch. Ask death's advice and drop the cursed pettiness that belongs to men that live their lives as if death will never tap them... It doesn't matter what the decision is. Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions we make in the face of our inevitable death." -

"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable." - Albert Einstein

"Being a parent used to be on of the most simple, natural, inevitable developments in the world. But nowadays, one has no business being married unless, waking and sleeping, one is conscious of the responsibility." - Abraham Flexner

"The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence." -

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom." - Andrew Bonar Law

"War is no more inevitable than the plague is inevitable. War is no more a part of human nature than the burning of witches is a human act." - Nancy Gentile Ford

"It takes a lot of self-love and presumption to have such esteem for one’s own opinions that to establish them one must overthrow the public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils, and such a horrible corruption of morals, as civil wars and political changes bring with them in a matter of such weight - and introduce them into one’s own country." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"The paranormal suffers the inevitable fate of becoming the normal in process of time." - Omananda Puri, aka Swami Omananda Puri, born Maud MacCarthy

"It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare." -

"We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Each of us inevitable, each of us limitless - each of us with his or her right upon the earth, each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth, each of us here as divinely as any is here." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Aloneness is inevitable in being human. People cannot accept this. They should be aware of it and use it. It heightens your perception." -

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." -

"To my mind, there are two things that, in life, you can do about death. Either you can choose to ignore it, in which case you may have some success in making the idea of it go away for a limited period of time, or you can confront the prospect of your own death and try to analyze it and, in so doing, try to minimize some of the inevitable suffering that it causes. Neither way can you actually overcome it." -

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…. in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?" -

"The chromosome reproduces itself exactly and exactly once, building itself up from materials around it, mostly proteins. Nothing similar has been known to occur outside living matter, though regarded chemically, the DNA molecule is not fundamentally different from any other large molecule. Clearly then, some other principle prevails in living nature… Consider the DNA molecule… the main constituent of the chromosomes, with its 10,000 links, in which four different types occur in various arrangements… and assuming 32 links of the chain contain 8 of each type we get for the odds of a particular arrangement 1:1017 That is, one to a hundred thousand billion… the inevitable conclusion sis that whatever evolution may depend on, it certainly does not depend on chance." - L. Francis Edmunds

"If we believe that mankind has steadily progressed towards ahimsa (i.e., love), it follows that it has to progress towards it still further. Nothing in this world is static, everything is kinetic. If there is not progression, then there is inevitable retrogression. No one can remain without the eternal cycle, unless it be God Himself." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"Why worry one’s head over a thing that is inevitable? Why die before one’s death?" - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?" - Joan Halifax, fully Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax

"God is the source and goal of ideals by which to live triumphantly in the face of starkest grief. The sufferer who finds God as the strength and mainstay of his life does not merely acquiesce before the inevitable with stoic fortitude. He looks the tragedy in the face, and looks up to new heights of spiritual beauty to which he may mount by using his grief as a stairway to God’s glory." - Georgia Harkness

"Man is in process of becoming the perfected being whom God is seeking to create. However, this is not taking place – it is important to add – by a natural and inevitable evolution, but through a hazardous adventure in individual freedom." - John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick

"Evolution trends toward complexity and intelligence, not toward humans. There is nothing inevitable or sacrosanct about our current dominance on this planet" - David Hockey

"The transformation from non-living to living requires two steps. First, environmental sources must provide the energy needed to add an atom or two (also taken from the environment) to a molecular complex. The second step, the process is reversed; the added atoms and energy have to be returned to the environment – otherwise nothing more than a chemical activity is occurring. Thus, right at life’s beginning, natural selection seems inevitable." - David Hockey

"Accident is something relative. It appears only at the point of intersection of inevitable processes." - Georgi Plekhanov, fully Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." -

"Financial markets are driven by human nature and have a propensity to go to excess. This means that periodic financial crises of one sort or another are virtually inevitable." - Robert Edward Rubin, aka Eddy Rubin

"There is an inevitable tension between mysticism and religious orthodoxy… For the mystic, whatever his professed creed, final authority lies in his own experience." - Sidney Spencer

"The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence." -

"Anger is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Its absence means indifference - the most disastrous of all human failings." - Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede

"The tendency to form hierarchies shows itself in petty ways in corporations and bureaucracies, where people place enormous importance on how big their office is and how many windows it has. None of this shows that hierarchy is good, or desirable, or even inevitable; but it does show that getting rid of it is not going to be as easy as previous revolutionaries thought." - Peter Singer

"Historical events are not inevitable; it’s only in retrospect that they seem so." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Suffering is the essence of life, because it is the inevitable product of an unresolved tension between a living creature’s essential impulse to try to make itself into the centre of the Universe and its essential dependence on the rest of Creation and on the Absolute Reality." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"The emergence of a superman or a great mystic or a genius or a superior personality inevitably precipitates a social conflict. The conflict will be more or less acute, according to the degree in which the creative individual happens to rise above the average level of his former kin and kind. But some conflict is inevitable, since the social equilibrium which the genius has upset by the mere fact of his personal emergence has eventually to be restored either by his social triumph or by his social defeat." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - Author Unknown NULL

"To face the inevitable is to confront something sacred. As long as anything is uncertain, the roads are open in more than one direction, and right and wrong may have many aspects. But let the issue be determined, let the die be cast, and acceptance and adjustment become our immediate duty. Until God’s will be known, we may work and wrestle and pry to carry our point, to save the day, to win the prize, spurred only the more by the uncertainty; of the result. But let the result be known, however dark and disappointing, and we should view it in the light of God’s plan to make us His evident children, and ask what we are to learn, what next we are to do." - Author Unknown NULL

"Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"For certain is death for the born and certain is birth for the dead; therefore over the inevitable thou shouldst not grieve." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL

"To eternity itself there is no other handle than the present moment. Let any man examine his thoughts and he will find them ever occupied with the past or the future. We scarcely think at all of the present; or if we do, it is only to borrow the light which it gives for regulating the future. The present is never our object; the past and the present we use as means; the future only is our end. Thus, we never live, we only hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so. All the miseries of mankind come from one thing, not knowing how to remain alone." - Blaise Pascal