Great Throughts Treasury

"There is a striking parallelism between science and religion on this point. It is my conviction that that other world is anchored in eternity and the eternal is different from everlasting. Everlasting goes on forever with changes, but eternity is beyond time. It includes time, but is beyond time. The second thing this other world is anchored in is spirit rather than matter, the matrixes of space-time and matter it is not subject to. The third thing is that it is perfect. Those points all converge on a mathematical point, which exceeds our capacity of our left brain to put into words, so it cannot be adequately articulated. Our articulations can be, as a Zen monk would say, fingers pointing toward it at the moon." -

"Faith is deeper, richer, more personal. It is engendered by a religious tradition, in some cases and to some degree by its doctrines; but it is a quality of the person not of the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith

"It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to a person's extra-ordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy them." - Anthony Storr

"Men with power have an extraordinary capacity to convince themselves that what they want to do coincides with what society needs done for its [own] good." - Raymond Vernon

"Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I shall have the belief that I can do it. I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have it at the beginning." -

"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." -

"The authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal--equal with "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said and this they meant." - Abraham Lincoln

"The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. Never failure but low aim, is life greatest tragedy." - Benjamin E. Mayes

"Once people understand that change is a process--a developmental progression with distinct steps to move through--then our capacity to alter behavior is quite impressive. It is a marathon, not a 100-yard dash." - John Norcross

"It is safe to assume that the actions of our ancestors were guided by gratitude, obligation, retribution, and indignation before they developed enough language capacity for moral discourse." - Frans de Waal, fully Franciscus Bernardus Maria "Frans" de Waal

"The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary." - Adam Smith

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted." -

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted." -

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted." -

"Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure (has become) entertainment." - Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom

"Thinking for oneself is always arduous and is sometimes painful. The temptation to stop thinking and to take dogma on faith is strong. Yet, since the intellect does possess the capacity to think for itself, it also has the impulse and feels the obligation. We may therefore feel sure that the intellect will always refuse, sooner or later, to take traditional doctrines on trust." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

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

"Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum

"Character and intellect: the two poles of our capacity. One without the other is but half-way to happiness." - Baltasar Gracián

"Know yourself - in talents and capacity, in judgment and inclination." - Baltasar Gracián

"The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent as they have to speak." -

"A noble person is distressed by his own lack of capacity; he is never distressed at the failure of others to recognize his merits." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means." - Dag Hammarskjöld

"The whole world is created from Mind. How we perceive it is the whole story. If we see everything from our ego-centered view, everything is too much to handle. Always we feel limited, unable to cope with situations. We feel small, helpless, and out of control. If we go beyond the egoistic view of the self as separate, then we can enjoy a more magnanimous, panoramic perspective that we call Limitless Mind (dai shin), infinite capacity and complete faith in things just the way they are. It all depends on how we choose to view life. Dropping the ego-centered self we discover the real self, which is none other than no fixed self, completely open to each moment of life." - Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi

"The hopes of the world rest on the flexibility, vigor, capacity for new thought, and the fresh outlook of the young." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower

"In every step of the inquiry we are compelled to feel and acknowledge the immeasurable disproportion between the size of the object and the capacity of the human mind. We may strive to abstract the notions of time, of space, and of matter, which so closely adhere to all the perceptions of our experimental knowledge. But as soon as we presume to reason of infinite substance, of spiritual generation, as often as we deduce any positive conclusions from a negative idea, we are involved in darkness, perplexity, and inevitable contradiction." - Edward Gibbon

"The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance." - Eric Hoffer

"The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own." - Eric Hoffer

"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience." - George Bernard Shaw

"The two things that worthless people sacrifice everything for are happiness and freedom, and their punishment is that they get both only to find that they have no capacity for the happiness and no use for the freedom." - George Bernard Shaw

"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself." - George Santayana

"A life devoted to trifles, not only takes away the inclination, but the capacity for higher pursuits." - Hannah More

"Democracy is based on the conviction that people have the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right to govern themselves with reason and justice." - Harry S. Truman

"Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice." - Harry S. Truman

"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

"In its highest sense [the soul is] a vast capacity for God… A chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can be expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God’s image is kept without God’s spirit." - Henry Drummond

"Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction… If the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance." - Herbert Spencer

"Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring." - Horace Mann

"The moral capacity of man is the foundation and interpreter of all religion." - Immanuel Kant

"Work less on reaching enlightenment and more on developing the capacity to love." - Jack Kornfield

"In no country does one find so many men of eminent capacity for business, shrewd, forcible, and daring, who are so uninteresting, so intellectually barren, outside the sphere of their business understanding." - James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce

"Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things. This is one of the chief elements in what we vaguely call capacity. If you do not dare differ from your associates and teachers you will never be great or your life sublime. You may be the happier as a result, or you may be miserable. Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us." - James Harvey Robinson

"Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world – or to make it the last." -

"A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good." - John Foster Dulles

"The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner

"Our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the outer world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one’s own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one’s own mind and body." - Jon Kabat-Zinn

"The toddler is allowed to regulate his own exploratory behavior. What occurs as a result of this entire mechanism is that nature’s imperative to explore the world at large is overwhelmed by the greater imperative to avoid the pain of a broken relationship with the life-giving caregiver. What will be developed in the child is a capacity for deception as he tries to maintain some vestige of integrity while outwardly appearing to conform. Living a lie to survive a lying culture, the child forgets the truth of who he really is." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

"Success or failure, the truth of life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention." - Julia Cameron

"It is easier to judge a person's mental capacity by his questions than by his answers." - Duc de Lévis, fully Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis