Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing on earth consumes a man more completely than the passion of resentment." -

"The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth." -

"The all-round liberally educated man, from Paleolithic times to the time when the earth shall become a cold cinder, will always be the same, namely, the man who follows his standards, of truth and beauty, who employs his learning and observation, his reason, his expression, for purposes of production, that is, to add something of his own to the stock of the world's ideas." -

"We are not put here on earth to play around. There is work to be done. There are responsibilities to be met. Humanity needs the abilities of every man and woman." - Alden C. Palmer

"If the physician understands things exactly and sees and recognizes all illnesses in the macrocosm outside man, and if he has a clear idea of man and his whole nature, then and only then is he a physician. Then he may approach the inside of man; then he may examine his urine, take his pulse, and understand where each thing belongs. This would not be possible without profound knowledge of the outer man, who is nothing other than heaven and earth." -

"Thus we men, as God transmutes himself into one, we likewise on earth should resign ourselves and become one." -

"I believe we are here on earth to live, grow up and do what we can to make this world a better place... Life is to be lived to its fullest so that death is just another chapter. Memories of our lives, our works and our deeds will continue in others." - Rosa Parks

"The Perfect Way knows no difficulties, except that it refuses to make preferences. Only when freed from hate and love does it reveal itself fully and without disguise. A tenth of an inch’s difference, and heaven and earth are set apart. If you wish to see it before your own eyes have no fixed thoughts either for or against it. To set up what you like against what you dislike - this is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of the Way is not understood. Peace of mind is disturbed to no purpose... Pursue not the outer entanglements, dwell not in the inner void; be serene in the oneness of things, and dualism vanishes of itself... Transformations going on in the empty world that confronts us appear to be real because of Ignorance. Do not strive to seek after the True, only cease to cherish opinions... One in all, All in One - if only this is realized, no more worry about not being perfect. When the mind and each believing mind and Mind, this is where words fail, for it is not of the past, present or future." - Jianzhi Sengcan, Third Patriarch of Zen, Third Patriarch of Ch'an

"The earth we live on is so small that even if someone was honored by everyone on our planet it is still insignificant. Also, a person’s lifetime is so short that even if he received honor and approval his entire life, it is so short in comparison with eternity. This is the ultimate success an approval-seeker can hope for, but the reality is that even if you spend you entire life trying to win the approval of others, only a small number of people will know and approve of you. The approval you do gain lasts a very short time and is soon forgotten as if it never was." - Bachya Ibn Pekudah

"For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life." - Plotinus NULL

"We are each put on this earth to make a particular contribution to humanity... Although God, the Almighty, has a plan for every one of us, He gives us choices. It is our responsibility to make the best of those choices in order to achieve our ultimate purpose." - Mary Lou Retton

"For centuries and centuries the world has been struggling to divide up economic scarcity, and for the first time we have the tools of abundance with which to meet mankind's basic economic and material needs. If we will use these tools intelligently, with a sense of social and moral responsibility, they will enable us to solve mankind's basic material needs. Then we can devote greater time and energy and effort to the facilitation of man's growth as a social and cultural and spiritual being, which is the real meaning of life on this earth." -

"It is not this earth, nor the men who inhabit it, nor the sphere of our legitimate activity, that we may not love; but the way in which the love is given, which constitutes worldliness." -

"To serve God is not to pass our lives on our knees in prayer; it is to discharge on earth those obligations which our duty requires." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"There is no power on earth more formidable than the truth." -

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, - more than ruin, more even than death." -

"Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways." - Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

"Eyes will not see when the heart wishes them to be blind. Desire conceals truth as darkness does the earth." -

"When is a man free? Now when he is driftwood on the stream of life... free of all cares or worries or ambitions... He is not free at all... To be free in action, in struggle, in undiverted and purposeful achievement, to move forward towards a worthy objective across a fierce terrain of resistance, to be vital and allow in the exercise of a great enterprise - that is to be free, and to know the joy and exhilaration of true freedom. A man is free only when he has an errand on earth." - Abba Hillel Silver

"I entreat you not to be turned by the call of vulgar strength, of stupendous size, by the spirit of storage, by the multiplication of millions, without meaning and without end. Cherish the ideal of perfection, and to that, relate all your work and all your movements. Though you love the material things of earth, they will not hurt you and you will bring heaven to earth and soul into things." -

"Your mission is proving that a love for the earth, and for the things of the earth, is possible without materialism, a love without greed" -

"A passion comes to an end; it is carried off in a coffin, or, weeping in a post-chaise; it drops out of life one way or another, and the earth-clods close over it, and we see it no more. But it has been part of our souls, and it is eternal." - William Makepeace Thackeray

"A good heart, benevolent feelings, and a balanced mind, lie at the foundation of character. Other things may be deemed fortuitous; they may come and go; but character is that which lives and abides and is admired long after its possessor has left the earth." - John Todd

"The physical loss is not sufficient for mourning. Purely on a physical level what would a person gain if he lived many more years? What is the ultimate gain in devouring hundreds more chickens and thousands more loaves of bread? What is the overall difference if the deceased left all this to others? The Torah obligates us to mourn to emphasize the loss of the true value of life; which is the spiritual elevation a person could have gained if he were still alive. The Almighty placed him on this earth for this purpose. The person’s death should remind the mourners to fill their lives with the spiritual growth that they are capable of." - Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky

"Man is to know himself, and with full command of his conditions and unlimited time for action, is not only to soar toward, but absolutely attain to heights of being and of beauty hitherto undreamed of, and bringing fairly within his realization a heaven on earth, in true grandeur and happiness as far transcending the heaven of the orthodox Christian as that heaven transcends the heaven of the savage." - Paul Tyner

"I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to life in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not over anxious about your personal place; that makes you tolerant because you realize your own comic fallibility; that gives you tranquillity without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself." - Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole

"It is only in the stillness and simplicity of presence - when we are aware of what we are experiencing, when we are here with it as it unfolds - that we can really appreciate our life and reconnect with the ordinary magic of being alive on this earth... Our life is unsatisfactory only because we are not living it fully, because instead we are pursuing a happiness that is always somewhere else, other than where we are right now." - John Welwood

"No repentance on earth can undo the past." - Brooke Foss Westcott

"Grand is the seen, the light, to me - grand are the sky and stars, grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, but grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, lighting the slight, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea, (what were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?) More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul! More multiform far - more lasting thou than they." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"I think the enemy is here before us... I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed... I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our home land." - Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

"It is impossible for the will to attain to the sweetness and bliss of the divine union otherwise than in detachment, in refusing to the desire every pleasure in the things of heaven and earth." -

"Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth we are equally near heaven and to the infinite." -

"I am a particle of this organism called the earth... Life is because life must be... Life and death are cosmic breath... Each person designs his own destiny... The purpose of life is to continue developing consciousness." - Freddy Arevalo, aka Don Valerio Cohaila

"No man on earth is lucky in all things." - Bacchylides NULL

"Any heart turned God-ward, feels more joy in one short hour of prayer, than e'er was raised by all the feasts on earth since its foundation." - Gamaliel Bailey

"What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of heaven?" - Clara Lucas Balfour

"Love is to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth." - Honoré de Balzac

"What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms." - W. W. Battershall

"Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven; but when both are joined together, then doth the soul mount up to her eternal rest." - J. Beaumont

"Reenchantment with the Earth as a living reality is the condition for our rescue of the Earth from the impending destruction we are imposing on it. To carry this out effectively, we must now, in a sense, reinvent the human as a species within the community of life species. Our sense reality and of value must consciously shift from an anthropocentric to a biocentric norm of reference." -

"The seas are the heart's blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of earth's veins." - Henry Beston, born Henry Beston Sheahan

"Is not man himself the most unsettled of all the creatures of the earth? What is this trembling sensation that is intensified with each ascending step in the natural order?" - Ugo Betti

"He that studies to know duty, and labors in all things to do it, will have two heavens - one of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and the other of glory and happiness beyond the grave." - John Bowring, fully Sir John Bowring

"Man, though chained to earth, looks across time and space toward an unknown perfection which he may never reach but will forever seek." - Francis Scott Bradford

"Earth's crammed with Heaven and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"I am absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it." - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

"To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which extend, link after link, from earth to heaven." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"We are born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beings that pass before us like shadows will stay in our presence forever." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"Every other sin hath some pleasures annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both. We should strive against it, for if indulged in it will be to us as a foretaste of hell upon earth." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

"The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of the grace in the church and in the soul." - Richard Cecil