Great Throughts Treasury

"Were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, Does he use ardent spirits?" - Thomas Jefferson

"When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it." - Thomas Jefferson

"Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference." - Thomas Merton

"I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts." - Thomas Merton

"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest." - Thomas Merton

"We are living at a time when it is absolutely es­sential to make a clean cut distinction between the magical attitude and the religious attitude in life. We have today as men never dreamed of having in other days, coercive control over tremendous forces in the natural world. We make daily trial of these forces, we “tempt” them, and they obey. We press the button, and throw the switch, and spin the dial, and step on the accelerator and the gods of all mythology touch their caps in deferential obedience to our slightest whim. The applied sciences of the twentieth century do make magicians of us all. It should be said at once that the pure scientist stands absolutely free of the charge of practicing magic. The affinities of pure science are with re­ligion, in that its reference is not from the universe to man’s uses, but from man to the realities of his universe. But the pure scientist is as rare a creature in our world as the pure saint. The vulgar modern heresy that society is made up of a large number of very pure scientists and an equally large number of very impure Christians is simply grotesque. Once in a while this world sees men like Saint Francis, John Woolman, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday; once in a great while. But the pure scientist is as much an exception in a university laboratory as the pure saint is an exception in a sectarian meeting house. For the most part we have at hand a society of persons practicing variously in the names of re­ligion and science a self-willed, uncritical, and arro­gant attempt to make the ultimate forces give them what they severally desire. And this temptation of the Lord their God is neither science nor religion in the noblest meaning of those words." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

"My native place was [alive] with old legends, tales, traditions, customs and superstitions; so that in my early youth, even beyond the walls of my own humble roof, they met me in every direction." - William Carleton

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." - William Congreve

"With melting airs, or martial, brisk, or grave; some chord in unison with what we hear is touch'd within us, and the heart replies." - William Cowper

"War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I have looked politics and the movies both over and, while they have much in common I believe politics is the most common, so I will stay with the movies." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Now if there is one thing that we do worse than any other nation, it is try and manage somebody else's affairs." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Jealousy, which serves the struggle for survival, can deteriorate into the envy which draws defeat even from victory." - Willard Gaylen

"Teen-agers have to discover the product. (Then) they tell their friends and it grows through a grass roots marketing effort" - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me... I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid, it is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol... Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"This is the city, and I am one of the citizens. Whatever interests the rest interests me" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Don't worry about life, you're not going to survive it anyway." - Walter Bagehot

"Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. The calculation of intrinsic value, though, is not so simple. As our definition suggests, intrinsic value is an estimate rather than a precise figure, and it is additionally an estimate that must be changed if interest rates move or forecasts of future cash flows are revised." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"The topics and treatment of the mathematics syllabus should be determined by the following principles: a. The course must be enjoyable and generate steadily increasing enthusiasm in the pupils, b. It should develop independence and activity of mind, curiosity, observation, and confidence, c. It should make pupils familiar with the basic ideas and processes of mathematics." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such- be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, t" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"All the same that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park...then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! -- that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Cosmic wisdom reveals why unhappy events happen, after which they cease to happen." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"To be happy with human beings, we should not ask them for what they cannot give" - Tristan Bernard, born Paul Bernard

"The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals is the means of his support-the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image." - William Godwin

"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying, We understand how it is - we have one, too." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Something more than love itself, behold the mystery of all that great." - Émile Souvestre

"One of the first rules on the spiritual path is that you must attend strictly to your own business and not interfere with that of others. Your neighbor's life is sacred and you have no right to try to manage it for him. Let him alone. God has given him free will and self-determination, so why should you interfere? Many well-meaning people are constantly "butting in"" to their neighbors' lives without invitation. They pretend to themselves that their only desire is to help, but this is self-deception. It is really a desire to interfere. Interference always does more harm than good. Actually those who mind other people's business always neglect their own. The man who wants to put your house in order has always made a failure of his own life. M.Y.O.B. Of course, this does not mean that you are not to help people whenever you can; in fact, you should make it a rule to try to do at least one kind act every day; but you must do it without interfering or encroaching. When in doubt, claim Divine Guidance. It is always right to give your neighbor the right thought. Under any circumstances it can only do good to "Golden Key" him when you think of him. Don't fuss - God is running the universe." - Emmet Fox

"The law of circulation is a Cosmic Law. That means that it is true everywhere and on all planes. The law is that constant rhythmical movement is necessary to health and harmony. Now the opposite of circulation is congestion, and it may be said that all sickness, in harmony, or trouble of any kind is really due to some form of congestion. If you think this subject out for yourself you will be fascinated to find how generally true it is, and in what unexpected places it appears. Much ill health is due to emotional congestion. This leads to congestion of the nerve, blood, and lymphatic fluids, producing disease. The depression belief under which the country labored for ten years was a case of congestion. There was plenty of raw material, machinery, and skill, and a very wide- spread demand for goods; but a case of congestion occurred! The dust bowl trouble and its allied misfortune, the floods, is, of course, an example of congestion. War itself is really due to frustrated circulation on many planes of existence. Some students of metaphysics shut their minds to the reception of new truth, and this always produces mental congestion and a failure to demonstrate. You should treat yourself two or three times a week for free circulation on all planes-by claiming that God is bringing this about." - Emmet Fox

"And so, the question for the science of mental health must be­come an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that re­flects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead." - Ernest Becker

"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"'Let's leave it alone, Eddy,' Thomas Hudson said. 'It's way past things we know about.'" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Be cheerful in all that you do. Live joyfully. Live happily. Live enthusiastically, knowing that God does not dwell in gloom and melancholy, but in light and love." - Ezra Taft Benson

"Leaders of youth, teach our young people to love freedom, to know that it is God-given. . . . Teach them to love their country, to know that it has a spiritual foundation, that it has a prophetic history, that it is the LordÂ’s base of operation. Teach them that the Constitution of the United States was established by men whom God raised up for that very purpose, that it is not outmoded, that it is not an old-fashioned agrarian document, as some men in high places are calling it today." - Ezra Taft Benson

"The antidote for pride is humility; meekness; submissiveness... Let us choose to be humble. We can choose to humble ourselves by conquering enmity toward our brothers and sisters, esteeming them as ourselves, and lifting them as high or higher than we are... We can choose to humble ourselves by receiving counsel and chastisement... We can choose to humble ourselves by forgiving those who have offended us... We can choose to humble ourselves by rendering selfless service... We can chose to humble ourselves by going on missions and preaching the word that can humble others... We can choose to humble ourselves by getting to the temple more frequently... We can choose to humble ourselves by confessing and forsaking our sins and being born of God... We can choose to humble ourselves by loving God, submitting our will to His, and putting Him first in our lives" - Ezra Taft Benson

"We must not be cast down or discouraged in this work. There is no basis for discouragement. We are not alone. We will not, we cannot fail if we will do our duty. The Lord will magnify us even beyond our present talents and abilities." - Ezra Taft Benson

"It is the prerogative of man that he need not blindly follow the law of his natural being, but is himself the author of a higher moral law, and creates it even in acting it out." - Felix Adler

"One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness." - Gustave Flaubert