Great Throughts Treasury

"We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea." - Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco

"The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State." - Simone Weil

"Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"The worst use that can be made of success is to boast of it." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently: ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’" - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"I have heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"My first glance is always at a woman's sleeve. In a man it is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"In a small town of the Aveyron or the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been made decisive by the ardour of the climate. Beneath our more sombre skies, a penniless young man, who is ambitious only because the refinement of his nature puts him in need of some of those pleasures which money provides, is in daily contact with a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, occupied with her children, and never looks to novels for examples of conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens by degrees in the provinces: life is more natural." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference." - Stephan Jay Gould

"In France, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire attempted to portray the skeleton of vertebrates as a set of modifications upon an archetypal vertebra. In the 1820's, Geoffroy extended his ambitious plan to include annelids and arthropods under that same rubric. ...Vertebrates support their soft parts with an internal skeleton, but insects must live within their vertebrae (a reality, not a metaphor, for Geoffroy). This comparison led to... the claim that a vertebrate rib must represent the same organ as an arthropod leg - and that insects must therefore walk on their own ribs!" - Stephan Jay Gould

"We talk about the ‘march from monad to man’ (old-style language again) as though evolution followed continuous pathways to progress along unbroken lineages. Nothing could be further from reality. I do not deny that, through time, the most ‘advanced’ organism has tended to increase in complexity. But the sequence [allocated in most texts] from jellyfish to trilobite to nautiloid to armored fish to dinosaur to monkey to human is no lineage at all, but a chronological set of termini on unrelated evolutionary trunks. Moreover life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense — only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in." - Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey

"Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment." - Stefan Zweig

"The Jewish people asked nothing of its sons except not to be denied. The world is grateful to every great man when he brings it something; only the paternal home thanks the son who brings nothing but himself." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl

"The enraged man always appears as the gang-leader of his own self, giving his unconscious the order to pull no punches, his eyes shining with the satisfaction of speaking for the many that he himself is. The more someone has espoused the cause of his own aggression, the more perfectly he represents the repressive principle of society. In this sense more than in any other, perhaps, the proposition is true that the most individual is the most general." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home." - Theodore Parker

"Don't ever let anybody teach you to think; it is the curse of the world." - Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White

"A just war is in the long run far better for a nation's soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence in wrong or injustice." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Above all, in this speech, as in so many others, he taught a lesson in wise kindliness and charity; an indispensable lesson to us of to-day, for if we approach the work of reform in a spirit of vindictiveness-in a spirit of reckless disregard for the rights of others, or of hatred for men because they are better off than ourselves—we are sure in the end to do not good but damage to all mankind, and especially to those whose especial champions we pro-fess ourselves to be." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"I am in this cause with my whole heart and soul. I believe that the Progressive movement is making life a little easier for all our people; a movement to try to take the burdens off the men and especially the women and children of this country. I am absorbed in the success of that movement." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words count only when they give expression to deeds, or are to be translated into them. The leaders of the Red Terror prattled of peace while they steeped their hands in the blood of the innocent; and many a tyrant has called it peace when he has scourged honest protest into silence. Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We live in a great and free country only because our forefathers were willing to wage war rather than accept the peace that spells destruction." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The Shameless man is one who, in the first place, will and borrow from the creditor whose money he is withholding." - Theophrastus NULL

"Avoid an act which you may repent later; if done by mistake, better not to repeat it." - Thiruvalluvar NULL

"No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves." - Thomas Carlyle

"Behold the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet your heavenly Father careth for them. He expatiates on a single flower, and draws from it the delightful argument of confidence in God. He gives us to see that taste may be combined with piety, and that the same heart may be occupied with all that is serious in the contemplations of religion, and be at the same time alive to the charms and the loveliness of nature." - Thomas Chalmers

"The beauty of holiness has done more, and will do more, to regenerate the world and bring in everlasting righteousness than all the other agencies put together." - Thomas Chalmers

"We do not steady a ship by fixing the anchor on aught that is within the vessel. The anchorage must be without. And so of the soul, when resting, not on what it sees in itself, but on what it sees in the character of God, the certainty of His truth, the impossibility of His falsehood." - Thomas Chalmers

"With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness." - Thomas Chalmers

"Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act." - Thomas Jefferson

"I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy." - Thomas Jefferson

"It is proof of sincerity, which I value above all things; as, between those who practice it, falsehood and malice work their efforts in vain." - Thomas Jefferson

"Men of high learning and abilities are few in every country; and by taking in those who are not so, the able part of the body have their hands tied by the unable." - Thomas Jefferson

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." - Thomas Jefferson

"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster cruel vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed beast like god one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes fools and hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson

"The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people." - Thomas Jefferson

"The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them." - Thomas Jefferson

"The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing." - Thomas Jefferson

"Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing ... this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man." - Thomas Jefferson

"A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is." - Thomas Nagel

"Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics." - Thomas Nagel

"Private property is a legal convention, defined in part by the tax system; therefore, the tax system cannot be evaluated by looking at its impact on private property, conceived as something that has independent existence and validity. Taxes must be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Justice or injustice in taxation can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular tax regime." - Thomas Nagel

"The denier that ID [intelligent design] is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken." - Thomas Nagel

"It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy." - Thomas Paine