Great Throughts Treasury

"Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs." - Claude-Adrien Helvétius

"Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die." - Max Horkheimer

"It has become a settled principle that nothing which is good and true can be destroyed by persecution, but that the effect ultimately is to establish more firmly, and to spread more widely, that which it was designed to overthrow. It has long since passed into a proverb that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”" - Albert Barnes

"Assassination makes only martyrs, not converts." - Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine

"Education should be constructed on two bases: morality and prudence. Morality in order to assist virtue, and prudence in order to defend you against the vices of others. In tipping the scales toward morality, you merely produce dupes and martyrs. In tipping it the other way, you produce egotistical schemers." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas

"A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men’s iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural thing." - William Godwin

"The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and number. So blinded are we to our passions, that we suffer more to insure perdition than salvation." - Hannah More

"Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist" - John Keats

"It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo

"The ink of scholars (used in writing) is weighed on the Day of Judgement with the blood of martyrs and the ink of scholars outweighs the blood of martyrs." - Muhammad, also spelled Mohammad, Mohammed or Mahomet, full name Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allāh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib NULL

"Even now I know it: yes, all my hopes will be fulfilled... yes... the Lord will work wonders for me which will surpass infinitely my immeasurable desires." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"Time is but a shadow, a dream; already God sees us in glory and takes joy in our eternal beatitude. How this thought helps my soul! I understand then why He lets us suffer..." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"No instance exists of a person’s writing two languages perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth." - Thomas Jefferson

"A poet does not work by square or line." - William Cowper

"I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested, Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Tenderly, be not impatient, (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, Strong is your hold O love.)" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes." - Walter Lippmann

"We must ask the high cadres ... When you suppressed the rights of others to express freely their political views, did you secure your own?" - Wei Jingsheng or Jing-sheng

"Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Ideas are malleable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"I'm looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny." - William Godwin

"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door." - William James

"Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it." - Emil M. Cioran