Great Throughts Treasury

"I know of nothing more opposite to revolutionary attitudes than commercial ones. Commerce is naturally adverse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. It is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme measures until obliged by the most absolute necessity. Commerce renders men independent of one another, gives them a lofty notion of their personal importance, leads them to seek to conduct their own affairs, and teaches how to conduct them well; it therefore prepares men for freedom, but preserves them from revolutions." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"There is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you." - Charles Dudley Warner

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force." - John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"Do the best you can do with what you’re connected to at that moment. That’s your life’s purpose for that moment. Don’t try to find some absolute best thing. Go in the side door or the back door, and maybe you’ll find what your life purpose is." - Carol Adrienne

"Supreme judgment… is absolute and universal love that embraces everything and turns every antagonism into complementarity." - Herman Aihara

"Error, falsehood, evil are cosmic powers, but relative in their nature, not absolute, since they depend for existence upon the perversion or contradiction of their opposites, and are not like truth and good, self-existing absolutes, inherent aspects of the Supreme Self-Existent." -

"This is the essence of the problem faced by evolutionists wanting to engage ethical questions. The evolutionary humanist is pressed to an inescapable conclusion: There are no absolute moral standards, and morality is merely the result of an interplay between evolution, tradition, and social convention, which can be altered, updated, and changed depending on the situation... diminished responsibility." - Joe Boot

"There is an absolute truth about everything; it lies behind all blunders and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, unfound certainty, like the great sea beneath its waves, like the great sky behind its clouds. God knows it. It and the possession of it makes the eternal difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound, unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely existent behind and at the heart of everything." - Phillips Brooks

"Nothing is stable. Nothing absolute. All is fluid and changeable. There is an endless “becoming.”" - Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo

"Cruel persecution and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims." -

"Guide us to the topmost height of mystic love where the simple absolute and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the Secret Silence." - Dionysius the Areopagite, aka Saint Dionysius the Areopagite NULL

"The simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness." - Dionysius the Areopagite, aka Saint Dionysius the Areopagite NULL

"Materialism assumes a line of `continuity’ running through the whole scheme of nature, despite its obvious gaps; on the contrary, he underlines the significance of `discontinuity’ as positive evidence of the intervention of a higher source of influence which escapes man’s limited `scale of observation.’ A giant or a microbe would, with similar intelligence, observe the same phenomenon differently; they might be guided by their scales of observation to different, or at least, to modified conclusions. There is no scientific truth in an absolute sense. The phrase Ad veritatem per scientiam is an absurdity." - L. Francis Edmunds

"The absolute freedom of the will, which we bring down with us from the Infinite into the world of Time, is the principle of this our life." - Johann Gottlieb Fichte

"Every war of the future will be a war of religion, for no country will go to war till it can give its cause the color of a Crusade and so secure for its maintenance absolute loyalty of a heroic quality in the whole population." - W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester

"Granted that ritual in any realm from courtesy to worship can become formal, empty, and stiff. Nevertheless, with all its dangers it is an absolute necessity. We cannot… train children in the spirit of religion if the appropriate activities of worship and devotion are forgotten." -

"For me truth is the sovereign principle, the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God. Though the path of relative truth is straight and narrow, even my Himalayan blunders have seemed trifling, for daily the conviction is growing that He alone is real and all else is unreal." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul... I know god is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"The world is only a partial manifestation of the Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead is infinitely greater than any natural manifestation can be. By his very infinity, by his absolute freedom, he exists beyond all possibility of integral formulation in any scheme of worlds or extension of cosmic Nature, however wide, complex, endlessly varied this and every world may seem to us." - Sri Aurobindo, born Aurobindo Ghose or Ghose

"There is an experience of being in pure consciousness which gives lasting peace to the soul. It is an experience of the Ground or Depth of being in the Centre of the soul, an awareness of the mystery of being beyond sense and thought, which gives a sense of fulfillment, of finality, of absolute truth." - Bede Griffiths, born Alan Richard Griffiths and also known as Swami Dayananda (Bliss of Compassion

"Spiritual truth is beyond meaning; it doesn’t `mean’ anything. It can only be known, and that knowledge can only come about by becoming. Meaning is a mentation and a definition. Spiritual truth is a subjective awareness which is innately beyond intellection. For instance, what does a beautiful sunset `mean’? It doesn’t `mean’ anything; it is just startling that which it is, complete and total in and of itself. God is direct awareness and experience, a realization, a revelation, and the absolute perfection of pure subjectivity." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

"The splendor and metaphysical reality of morality flashes forth only when the absolute goodness is seen not merely as the platonic idea, but as the living God." - Dietrich von Hildebrand

"God always interior to man, and unyielding, He, the true conscience to the false; a prohibition to the spark to extinguish itself; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the real absolute when it is confronted with the fictitious absolute; humanity imperishable; that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful perhaps of our interior wonders." - Victor Hugo

"Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping this in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history." - William James

"This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute, and we become aware of our oneness." - William James

"There’s no absolute freedom anywhere in the world. Freedom is always relative." - Zhang Jie

"The essential truth... is that man is under absolute mandate to express divinity in his own life and his whole nature." - F. Ernest Johnson

"God is not an abstract reality, an absolute Alone, at the far end of Bethel-ladders and Babel-towers. He is central in the stream of Life and Love and Truth and Beauty. The reason we can hope to find God is that He is here, engaged all the time in finding us." -

"If God truly is the Absolute, then he is all these in one: Nirvana, insofar as he is the goal of the path of liberation; Dharma, insofar as he is described as the law of the cosmos and humanity; Emptiness, insofar as he constantly escapes all affirmative specifications; Primordial Buddha, insofar as he is the origin of all that is. Could one not, after all the explanations of emptiness, nirvana and dharmakaya in comparison with the Christian understanding of the Absoulte, despite all the divergences, also speak of convergence between Christianity and Buddhism?" -

"When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality." - Gabriel García Márquez, aka Gabo

"The only work of which we are absolute masters and over which we can have sovereign power, the only one that we can dominate, encompass in a glance, and organize, concerns our own heart." -

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift or law there is far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society." -

"Errors and exaggerations do not matter. What matters is boldness in thinking with a; strong-pitched voice, in speaking out about things as one feels them in the moment of speaking; in having the temerity to proclaim what one believes to be true without fear of the consequences. If one were to await the possession of the absolute truth, one must be either a fool or a mute. If the creative impulse were muted, the world would then be stayed on its march." - José Clemente Orozco

"All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan

"The Bible is primarily not man’s vision of God but God’s vision of man. The Bible is not man’s theology but God’s anthropology, dealing with man and what He asks of him rather than with the nature of God. God did not reveal to the prophets eternal mysteries but His knowledge and love of man. It was not the aspiration of Israel to know the Absolute but to ascertain what He asks of man; to commune with His will rather than with His essence." - Fritz A. Rothschild

"There is no one Hindu view of life or meaning, but rather multiple centers of meaning, belief and practice, all legitimately called Hinduism, and all connected yet radically different… Fundamentally, life and self-identity are seen as fluid, marked by impermanence, while ultimately there is an Absolute Oneness into which all the distinctions between multiple forms of the divine, the world, and human beings dissolve" - Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin

"Religions are cut off from one another by barriers of mutual incomprehension... the sense of the absolute stands on a different plane in each of them." -

"He who sets out in search of Truth must leave Superstition forever and wander down into the land of Absolute Negation and Denial. He must then go… where the mountains of Stern Reality will rise before him. Beyond them lies Truth." - Olive Schreiner

"The knowledge that mankind needs is not the way or principle which has an absolute existence, but the particular truths for here and now and for particular individuals. Absolute truth is imaginary, abstract, vague, without evidence, and cannot be demonstrated." - Hu Shih, born Hu Hung-hsing

"Nature has no heart… Absolute nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless, but lives in the life of God: and in so far, and so far merely, as man himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with Nature." - Francis Thomson

"Making the meaning of life depend on the Infinite threatens to deny the meaning of a purely finite life. We have rejected the assumption that only the infinite or the unlimited or the Absolute has meaning, or that finite things can have meaning only in relation to the Absolute." - Garrett Thomson

"The Absolute must be conceived as a process." - Garrett Thomson

"The meaning of life must be in the living of it. This is because, (a) in a sense, the meaning of one’s life is oneself, and (b) it is the person that has primary non-instrumental value. The individual has value and, consequently, so does his or her life and so do the processes that constitute that life. The finite processes of life have meaning, without the need of the Absolute." - Garrett Thomson

"There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances." -

"Time, space, and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen… In the Absolute there is neither time, space, nor causation." -

"I've yet to meet an absolute perfectionist whose life was filled with inner peace." - Richard Carlson

"There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths." -

"An integral part of possessing a genuine moral clarity may be to recognize that rarely, if ever, does any moral situation boil down to an instance of absolute good versus absolute evil...Genuine moral clarity involves ceaseless and rigorous questioning and evaluation of one's works and deeds and ends in life, and the means one chooses to realize one's works and deeds and ends." - Christopher R. Phillips

"It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style." -

"Morality… timeless, transcendental, absolute" - Alan Wolfe