Great Throughts Treasury

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions derived from anywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing figure, from a spider’s web. This is ’s web. This is why one must not make a distinction between things. For them there are no aristocratic quarterings. One must take things where one finds them." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"The distinction between good and evil matters. Quality and standards are sources of pride and honor. These are not meaningless terms. These are not simply behaviors. These are feelings, emotions,passions, meanings, and sources of significance!" - Peter Koestenbaum

"So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species? " - Peter Singer

"The laws which in the culture of art have become more and more determinate are the great hidden laws of nature which art establishes in its own fashion. It is necessary to stress the facts that these laws are more or less hidden behind the superficial aspects of nature. Abstract art is therefore opposed to a natural representation of things. But it is not opposed to nature as is generally thought. It is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but is one with true human nature. It is opposed to the conventional laws created during the culture of the particular form but it is one with the laws of the culture of pure relationships. First and foremost there is the fundamental law of dynamic equilibrium which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by the particular form. The important task then of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms or free lines. We must bear in mind, however, a distinction between these two forms of equilibrium in order to avoid confusion; for when we speak of equilibrium pure and simple we may be for, and at the same time against, a balance in the work of art." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian

"Millions of singular sociocultural phenomena that make the superorganic world of reality appear to us in the form of the integrated systems and unintegrated congeries. If two or more singular superorganic phenomena are related to one another only by chance (by mere spatial or time adjacency) they are congeries having no real unity and interdependence between them. If two or more singular sociocultural facts are tied together meaningfully and causally in such a way that they articulate consistently the same set of meanings (values, norms) and empirically-in their vehicles and human members-show tangible (causal) interdependence of its important parts, such combination of any number of singular sociocultural phenomena makes an integrated cultural system or organized social system (Ganzbuten). Though overlooked by the majority of sociologists, the distinction between the systems and congeries is basic and important in many respects and especially for the purposes of adequate study of the sociocultural phenomena." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For us convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, albeit a persistent one. " - Albert Einstein

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein

"I finally awakened to the distinction between getting high and becoming free. Highs are part of the world of polarities: What goes up must come down. The deeper requirement would be to pursue the middle course and be at peace, free form whatever may happen, whether high or low." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert

"Discrimination and renunciation. Discrimination means to know the distinction between the Real and the unreal. Renunciation means to have dispassion for the things of the world. One cannot acquire them all of a sudden. They must be practiced every day. One should renounce " - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"If you first fortify yourself with the true knowledge of the Universal Self, and then live in the midst of wealth and worldliness, surely they will in no way affect you. When the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low" - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"There are two ways. One is the path of discrimination, the other is that of love. Discrimination means to know the distinction between the Real and the unreal. God alone is the real and permanent Substance; all else is illusory and impermanent. The magician alone is real; his magic is illusory. This is discrimination." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"When divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"When the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"At the very least, people ought to think twice before throwing up their hands in horror at manipulating genes to, say, make a child good at music while approving sending a child to a school that is especially good at music. These are the same kinds of things. The genetic equivalent of sending your child to Eton is going to be expensive, too. There is no obvious distinction between spending your money on one kind of child manipulation and the other... You will immediately see the oddness in what you have just said. You are saying that one works and the other doesn't. It's odd to take refuge in lack of efficiency as a defense." - Richard Dawkins

"Now if the world of nature is made of atoms, and we too are made of atoms and obey physical laws, the most obvious interpretation of this evident distinction between past and future, and this irreversibility of all phenomena, would be that some laws, some of the motion laws of the atoms, are going one way " - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"Thou art wise. And wisdom is the fount of life and from Thee it welleth, And by the side of Thy wisdom all human knowledge turneth to folly. Thou art wise, more ancient than all primal things, And wisdom was the nursling at Thy side. Thou art wise, and Thou hast not learnt from any beside Thee, Nor acquired wisdom from any save Thyself. Thou art wise, and from Thy wisdom Thou hast set apart Thy appointed purpose, Like a craftsman and an artist To draw up the films of Being from Nothingness As light is drawn that darteth from the eye: Without bucket from the fountain of light hath Thy workman drawn it up, And without tool hath he wrought, Hewing, graving, cleansing, refining, Calling unto the void and it was cleft, And unto existence and it was urged, And to the universe and it was spread out; Establishing the clouds of the heavens And with his hand joining together the pavilions of the spheres, And fastening with the loops of power the tent-folds of creation, For the might of his hand extendeth to the uttermost borders, "Linking the uttermost ends."" - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"Patience in the home, with one’s family, requires a separate and unique treatment. The closer the relationship is, the more patience that relationship demands. We come into contact with our friends from time to time, and even when we do, we rarely will quarrel or become angry. In contrast, we come into contact with our neighbors all the time and thus struggle through many instances requiring patience. Indeed, it is more difficult to be a good neighbor than a good friend. However, it is most difficult to maintain our patience when it comes to our family, with whom we spend our days and nights, through all types of situations. It is fair to say that the middah which sustains a proper household is patience." - Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe

"When we do elect activists, we want them to change the thinking and behavior of other people, rarely our own." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"Yet those who do lead usually feel that they are taking action beyond whatever authority they have." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"My only objection to the arrangements there is the two-in-a-bed system. It is bad.... But let your words and conduct be perfectly pure — such as your mother might know without bringing a blush to your cheek.... If not already mentioned, do not tell your mother of the doubling in bed." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation." - Samuel Alexander

"Do not measure your loss by itself; if you do, it will seem intolerable; but if you will take all human affairs into account you will find that some comfort is to be derived from them." - Saint Basil, aka Basil of Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great NULL

"What is evil unless it is the absence of good?" - Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL

"I receive Thee ransom of my soul. For love of Thee have I studied and kept vigil toiled preached and taught." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"I hope that this man can be won over by your bearing charitably with him, advising him prudently, and praying for him. This is what I do for your family in general and for you in particular." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought." - Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL

"But it is evident, that these bursts of universal distress are more dreaded than felt; thousands and ten thousands flourish in youth, and wither in age, without the knowledge of any other than domestic evils, and share the same pleasures and vexa?tions, whether their kings are mild or cruel, whether the armies of their country pursue their enemies or retreat before them." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Traditional explanations for stasis and abrupt appearance had paid an awful price in sacrificing the possibility of empirics for the satisfaction of harmony. Eventually we (primarily Niles) recognized that the standard theory of speciation—Ernst Mayr's allopatric or peripatric scheme—would not, in fact, yield insensibly graded fossil sequences when extrapolated into geological time, but would produce just what we see: geologically unresolvable appearance followed by stasis. For if species almost always arise in small populations isolated at the periphery of parental ranges, and in a period of time slow by the scale of our lives but effectively instantaneous in the geological world of millions, then the workings of speciation should be recorded in the fossil record as stasis and abrupt appearance. The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Is God a being less to be regarded than man, and more worthy of contempt than a creature? It would be strange if a benefactor should live in the same town, in the same house, with us, and we never exchange a word with him; yet this is our case, who have the works of God in our eyes, the goodness of God in our being, the mercy of God in our daily food, yet think so little of him, converse so little with him, serve everything before him, and prefer everything above him. Whence have we our mercies but from his hand? Who, besides him, maintains our breath at this moment? Would he call for our spirits this moment, they must depart from us to attend his command. There is not a moment wherein our unworthy carriage is not aggravated, because there is not a moment wherein he is not our guardian and gives us not tastes of a fresh bounty." - Stephen Charnock

"Man witnesseth to a God in the operations and reflections of conscience. Their thoughts are accusing or excusing. An inward comfort attends good actions, and an inward torment follows bad ones; for there is in every man’s conscience fear of punishment and hope of reward: there is, therefore, a sense of some superior judge, which hath the power both of rewarding and punishing. If man were his supreme rule, what need he fear punishment, since no man would inflict any evil or torment on himself; nor can any man be said to reward himself, for all rewards refer to another, to whom the action is pleasing, and is a conferring some good a man had not before; if an action be done by a subject or servant, with hopes of reward, it cannot be imagined that he expects a reward from himself, but from the prince or person whom he eyes in that action, and for whose sake he doth it." - Stephen Charnock

"One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist" - Stephen Hawking

"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." - Stephen Hawking

"Life has become the ideology of its own absence." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"No, I'm not a good shot, but I shoot often." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless. Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country… For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal." - Thomas Hardy

"By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently." - Thomas Hobbes

"The difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend as well as he." - Thomas Hobbes

"Nothing is more incumbent on the old, than to know when they should get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform." - Thomas Jefferson

"Unfortunately the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of man in fighting the fiction which it calls the enemy. For man is concrete and alive, but the enemy is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real men in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love. It refuses, a priori, to love. It is dedicated not to concrete relations of man with man, but only to abstractions about politics, economics, psychology, and even, sometimes, religion." - Thomas Merton

"To make sense of interpersonal compensation it is not necessary to invoke the silly idea of a social entity, thus establishing an analogy with intrapersonal compensation. All one needs is the belief, shared by most people, that it is better for each of 10 people to receive a benefit than for one person to receive it, worse for 10 people to be harmed than for one person to be similarly harmed, better for one person to benefit greatly than for another to benefit slightly, and so forth." - Thomas Nagel

"But there is not a passage in the Old Testament that speaks of a person, who, after being crucified, dead, and buried, should rise from the dead, and ascend into heaven." - Thomas Paine

"Statues of marble or brass will perish; and statues made in imitation of them are not the same statues ... But print and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and that with materials of any kind ... the thought is eternally and identically the same thought in every case." - Thomas Paine

"Article 8 - The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs." - United Nations NULL

"This perpetual struggle between the magician and the religionist goes on in the mind and heart and will of every man of us. It goes on until it is rightly resolved, until man reborn into a mature religion ceases to try to coerce his God, and says humbly with Dante, “In thy will is our peace.” Religion, then, is not a matter of turning God to account in the realiza­tion of our own desires. Religion is trying to dis­cover what God is about and then offering oneself to the Eternal Goodness, “as a man’s hand is to a man.” “It is not in man,” says a modern thinker, “to make religion what he will have her be, but only to become what religion is making him.” Perhaps, then, it is to save a man from the defeat and disillusionment of childish magic that there stands in our Bible that old story of the temptation of Jesus. Its ramifications and restatements are legion. Thou shalt not use thy God to get thy way. Thou shalt not coerce the Infinite to further the headstrong passing whim of the finite. Thou shalt not break the laws of health and then cajole thy God into working thee a miracle of healing. Thou shalt not let thy mind rot in idleness and then look for a sudden in­spiration given by reality. Thou shalt not spend thine all upon the world that passes away and ask thy God at thy latter end to give thee the sudden boon of a credible immortality. Thou shalt not take this attitude at all, using the Most High as an amplifier and emergency device for realizing thy soli­tary and selfish will. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” We are being told on all sides that religion is now breaking down, that its beliefs are an outworn delu­sion, and that all thoughtful men are being liberated into a perfect skepticism. That is not what is hap­pening. What is happening is this, men are dis­covering again what they have discovered often be­fore and then have forgotten, that magic will not work. But religion as a final attitude and reference of the finite human spirit towards its infinite universe remains and always must remain. It is the disposi­tion of those disciplined natures of whom we say that they are pure in mind and heart and will. The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry