Great Throughts Treasury

"Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions." - Stephen Hawking

"Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with." - Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey

"There might finally emerge a human animal of rare sensitivity whose curiosity could sense the existence of environments no longer physical, where the adaption required of all the species was a subtle change of consciousness." - Theodore Roszak

"A nation without credibility and moral authority cannot lead, because no one will follow." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"As a child walking over a slippery and dangerous path cries out, "Father, I am falling!" and has but a moment to catch his father's hand, so every believer sees hours when only the hand of Jesus comes between him and the abysses of destruction." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

"The Bible is full of trees; from the time when Adam and Eve sat under their shadow in Eden, on to that splendid vision of the, New Jerusalem, where the tree of life bears twelve manner of fruits and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. Absalom's oak, and Elijah's juniper, and Jonah's gourd, and the sycamore which hoisted little Zaccheus into notice, are all familiar to every Sunday school scholar. Our Lord hung one of His most solemn parables on the boughs of a barren fig tree, and drew one of His most apt illustrations of the growth of His kingdom from the mustard which becomes tall enough for the birds to nestle in its branches." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

"I have four good reasons for being an abstainer—my head is clearer, my health is better, my heart is lighter, and my purse is heavier." - Thomas Guthrie

"Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." - Thomas Jefferson

"Believing that the happiness of mankind is best promoted by the useful pursuits of peace, that on these alone a stable prosperity can be founded, that the evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come, I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side." - Thomas Jefferson

"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both." - Thomas Jefferson

"I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box." - Thomas Jefferson

"Resolved... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go…In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." - Thomas Jefferson

"To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other." - Thomas Jefferson

"Contemplation is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." - Thomas Merton

"If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us." - Thomas Merton

"The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be converted – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that viewing things from a basically different perspective – that of our adversary – we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically." - Thomas Merton

"What are we going to do about it? Well, for one thing, we can be aware of these immature and inadequate ideas. We do not have to let ourselves be dominated by them. We are free to think in better terms. Of course, we cannot do this all by ourselves. We need the help of articulate voices, themselves taught and inspired by love. This is the mission of the poet, the artist, and the prophet. Unfortunately, the confusion of our world has made the message of our poets obscure and our prophets seem altogether silent–unless they are devoting their talents to the praise of toothpaste." - Thomas Merton

"Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure; gone is our sport, fled is poor Croydon's pleasure. Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace, ah! who shall hide us from the winter's face? Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease, and here we lie, God knows, with little ease. From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us!" - Thomas Nashe

"Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to read." - Thomas Paine

"I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." - Thomas Paine

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." - Thomas Paine

"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it." - Thomas Paine

"The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system." - Thomas Paine

"The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less." - Thomas Paine

"The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age, may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living, or the dead?" - Thomas Paine

"The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government." - Thomas Paine

"We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute." - Thomas Paine

"You have too much at stake to hesitate. You ought not to think an hour upon the matter, but to spring to action at once. Other states have been invaded have likewise driven off the invaders. Now our time and turn is come, and perhaps the finishing stroke is reserved for us. When we look back on the dangers we have been saved from, and reflect on the success we have been blessed with, it would be sinful either to be idle or to despair." - Thomas Paine

"The Worship of God - It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend. The man who permits you to injure him deserves your vengeance; He also will receive it. Go, Spectre! obey my most secret desire, Which thou knowest without my speaking. Go to these Friends of Righteousness, Tell them to obey their Humanities, and not pretend Holiness, When they are murderers. As far as my Hammer and Anvil permit, Go tell them that the Worship of God is honouring His gifts In other men, and loving the greatest men best, each according To his Genius, which is the Holy Ghost in Man: there is no other God than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity. He who envies or calumniates, which is murder and cruelty, Murders the Holy One. Go tell them this, and overthrow their cup, Their bread, their altar-table, their incense, and their oath, Their marriage and their baptism, their burial and consecration. I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts, but have only Made enemies; I never made friends but by spiritual gifts, By severe contentions of friendship, and the burning fire of thought. He who would see the Divinity must see Him in His Children, One first in friendship and love, then a Divine Family, and in the midst Jesus will appear. So he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole, Must see it in its Minute Particulars, organized; and not as thou, O Fiend of Righteousness, pretendest! thine is a disorganized And snowy cloud, brooder of tempests and destructive War. You smile with pomp and rigour, you talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with benevolence and virtue, and get murder’d time after time; You accumulate Particulars, and murder by analysing, that you May take the aggregate, and you call the aggregate Moral Law; And you call that swell’d and bloated Form a Minute Particular. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars; and every Particular is a Man." - William Blake

"Human nature is said by many to be good; if so, where have social evils come from? For human nature is the only moral nature in that corrupting thing called "society." Every example set before the child of to-day is the fruit of human nature. It has been planted on every possible field — among the snows that never melt; in temperate regions, and under the line; in crowded cities, in lonely forests; in ancient seats of civilization, in new colonies; and in all these fields it has, without once failing, brought forth a crop of sins and troubles." - William Arthur

"No enumeration of the fruits of the Spirit will be found which excludes peace and joy, much less love; and from these graces, if, indeed, not from the last alone, spring the various fruits which unitedly constitute righteousness." - William Arthur

"A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing." - William Barclay

"Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory." - William Barclay

"Here is the great truth that, only when we see things in the light of God, do we see things as they are. It is only when we see things in the light of God that we see what things are really important, and what things are not. These things seem vastly important, things like ambition, and prestige, and money and gain, lose all their value and importance when they are seen in the light of God. Pleasures and habits and social customs which seem permissible enough, are seen for the dangerous things they are when they are seen in the light of God. Things which seem evils, hardship, toil, discipline, unpopularity, even persecution, are seen in their glory when they are seen in the light of God." - William Barclay

"There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble, and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger." - William Barclay

"Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself." - William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett

"A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings." - William Blake

"Humility is only doubt, and does the sun and moon blot out." - William Blake

"I was in a printing-house in hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation." - William Blake

"When one that holds communion with the skies has fill'd his urn where these pure waters rise, and once more mingles with us meaner things, 'tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings." - William Cowper

"I bet you if I had met him [Trotsky] and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I didn’t like. When you meet people, no matter what opinion you might have formed about them beforehand, why, after you meet them and see their angle and their personality, why, you can see a lot of good in all of them." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"If this depression stays with us, the loser Tuesday is going to be the winner." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his "imagination" upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency." - Wendell Phillips

"Walking uplifts the spirit. Breathe out the poisons of tension, stress, and worry; breathe in the power of God. Send forth little silent prayers of goodwill toward those you meet. Walk with a sense of being a part of a vast universe. Consider the thousands of miles of earth beneath your feet; think of the limitless expanse of space above your head. Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible." - Wilhelm Reich

"All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Remember my words, I may again return, I love you, I depart from materials, I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,) to cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman