Great Throughts Treasury

"Mental pleasures never clog; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Physicians must discover weaknesses of the human mind, and even condescend to humour them, or they will never be called in to cure the infirmities of the body." - Charles Caleb Colton

"In death, there are no rulers above and no subjects below. The course of the four seasons is unknown; our life is eternal. Even a king among men can experience no greater happiness than is ours… If I could restore your body to you, renew your bones and your flesh and take you back to your parents, your wife, and children and old friends, would you not gladly accept my offers?… Why should I throw away a happiness greater than a king’s to once again thrust myself into the troubles and anxieties of mankind?" - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

"In play, the body can learn the model for actions in real life. Its lust can prepare a man to endure tribulation." - Dag Hammarskjöld

"Life is like a tree, and its root is consciousness. Therefore, once we tend the root, the tree as a whole will be healthy. Nature controls healing form this deeper level already, for every cell participates in the body's inner intelligence, responding to the patient's thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs, and self-image." - Deepak Chopra

"Our limitations and success will be based, most often, on your own expectations for ourselves. What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon." - Denis E. Waitley

"In the absence of discriminating thoughts, the mind as we know it ceases to exist. Our suffering - our feeling of discomfort, alienation, loneliness - arises because we create a dualistic way of perceiving everything that separates us from the external. When we view the so-called external phenomenal world as distinct from ourselves, then fear arises, fear that we will lose our lives, that we may not continue to exist. Out of that fear come anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, aversion, attachment - all kinds of clinging. All our problems arise out of seeing ourselves as separate entities. We cling to what we perceive as me; my physical body and my ideas, my mind, my thoughts, my understanding, my beliefs, my concepts, my opinions." - Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi

"Truth is perfect and complete in itself. It is not something newly discovered; it has always existed. Truth is not far away. It is nearer than near. There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it. Don't follow the advice of others; rather, learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become one, and you will realize the unity of all things." -

"We have peace as we abhor pusillanimity; but not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body. Chains are worse than bayonets." - Douglas William Jerrold

"Virtue is to the soul what health is to the body." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Idleness is the badge of the gentry, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active, and, if it is not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy." - Edmund Burke

"Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities, and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet." - Edmund Burke

"War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert their natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very nature of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity, whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved." - Edmund Burke

"(A dying person) – The hardest part is that everyone sees me in the past tense. No matter what is going on with my body, I will still be a whole person." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Who thinks to live must live to think, else mind and body lose their link." - English Proverbs

"Education is the learning how... to distinguish that of things some are in our power, but others are not; in our power are will and all acts which depend on the will; things not in our power are the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country, and, generally, all with whom we live in society." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL

"Fortune is an evil chain to the body, and vice to the soul." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL

"Rely on principles; walk erect and free, not trusting to bulk of body, like a wrestler, for one should not be unconquerable in the sense that an ass is. Who then is unconquerable? He whom the inevitable cannot overcome." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL

"It is through uneasiness that all habits of mind and body are born." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature." - Francis Bacon

"A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison." - Francis Bacon

"Cleanness of the body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God." - Francis Bacon

"Do not overwork the mind any more than the body; do everything with moderation." - Francis Bacon

"That they deny a God, destroy a man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by; his body; an if he is not kin to God by his spirit he is a base and ignoble creature." - Francis Bacon

"The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body and to reduce it to harmony." - Francis Bacon

"Hearing is one of the body's five senses. But listening is an art." - Frank Tyger

"Of all the tyrannies which have usurped power over humanity, few have been able to enslave the mind and body as imperiously as drug addiction." - Freda Adler

"The sound body is a product of the sound mind." - George Bernard Shaw

"Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body, it produces crime, disease and degradation." - George Bernard Shaw

"No body of men can be induced to do another man’s killing for him unless he can convince them that they may honorably do so. The percentage of blackguards and sadists who enjoy cruelty for its own sake have to pretend that they are patriots and ministers of justice to secure the toleration of their fellow citizens." - George Bernard Shaw

"This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing." - George Bernard Shaw

"The soul needs few things, the body many." - George Herbert

"A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that sustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit." - George Santayana

"A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering set themselves no limit." - George Santayana

"A dramatic centre of action and passion… utterly unlike what in modern philosophy we call consciousness. The soul causes the body to grow, to assume its ancestral shape, to develop all its ancestral instincts, to wake and to sleep by turns… and at the same time determines the responses that the living body shall make to the world." - George Santayana

"Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go for a walk alone, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions." - George Santayana

"Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit... It is widest at its base, which is no greater than his own capacity." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The eye is the jewel of the body." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The shadows of the mind are like those of the body. In the morning of life they lie behind us; at noon, we trample them under foot; and in the evening they stretch long, broad and deepening before us." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body." - Henry Ward Beecher

"To spend several days in a friend's house and hunger for something to read, while you are treading on costly carpets, and sitting upon luxurious chairs and sleeping upon down, is as if one were bribing your body for the sake of cheating your mind." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The soul of the truly benevolent man does not seem to reside much in his own body. Its life, to a great extent, is a mere reflex of the lives of others. It migrates into their bodies, and identifying its existence with their existence, finds its own happiness in increasing and prolonging their pleasures, in extinguishing or solacing their pains." - Horace Mann

"As it is the nature of the body to be developed by appropriate exercises, it is the nature of the soul to be developed by moral precepts." - Isocrates NULL

"What is essentially wrong with lust is not that the body is used carnally, but that the situation is such, the human relations are such, that this particular use of the body is the implementation of a wrong spirit." - James A. Pike, fully Bishop James Albert Pike

"Today we all realize that democracy is not a self-perpetuating virus adapted to any body politic - that was the assumption of a previous generation. Democracy as we know to be a special type of organism requiring specific nutriment materials - some economic, some social and cultural." - James Bryant Conant