Great Throughts Treasury

"Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!" - Thomas Carlyle

"Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you." - Thomas Carlyle

"Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!" - Thomas Carlyle

"With stupidity and sound digestion man may fret much; but what in these dull unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the liver." - Thomas Carlyle

"Each institution has demonstrated very distinctive characteristics to their situations. The NCAA hopefully will recognize how we are different from the other institutions that they've dealt with so far and will give us a favorable review in a timely fashion." - Thomas Hardy

"Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line -- less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all." - Thomas Hardy

"Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown." - Thomas Hardy

"A beauty is a promise of happiness." - Thomas Hobbes

"Because silver and gold have their value from the matter itself, they have first this privilege, that the value of them cannot be altered by the power of one, nor of a few commonwealths, as being a common measure of the commodities of all places. But base money may easily be enhanced or abased." - Thomas Hobbes

"They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion" - Thomas Hobbes

"A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion; that things even salutary should not be crammed down the throats of dissenting brethren, especially when they may be put into a form to be willingly swallowed, and that a great deal of indulgence is necessary to strengthen habits of harmony and fraternity." - Thomas Jefferson

"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people." - Thomas Jefferson

"I am sure the man who powders most, perfumes most, embroiders most, and talks most nonsense, is most admired. Though to be candid, there are some who have too much good sense to esteem such monkey-like animals as these, in whose formation, as the saying is, the tailors and barbers go halves with God Almighty." - Thomas Jefferson

"I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government, that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force." - Thomas Jefferson

"I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence." - Thomas Jefferson

"The law of self-preservation is higher than written law." - Thomas Jefferson

"Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object [religion]. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

"Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure you were created for Joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live." - Thomas Merton

"For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence." - Thomas Merton

"If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think and of acting in a way that betrays God’s truth and the integrity of my own soul." - Thomas Merton

"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

"It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them… Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say." - Thomas Merton

"Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love." - Thomas Merton

"One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife." - Thomas Merton

"Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved." - Thomas Merton

"The doctrine of man finding his true reality in his remembrance of God in whose image he was created, is basically Biblical and was developed by the Church Fathers in connection with the theology of grace, the sacraments, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the surrender of our own will, the “death” of our selfish ego, in order to live in pure love and liberty of spirit, is effected not by our own will (this would be a contradiction in terms!) but by the Holy Spirit. To “recover the divine likeness,” to “surrender to the will of God,” to “live by pure love,” and thus to find peace, is summed up as “union with God in the Spirit,” or “receiving, possessing the Holy Spirit.” This, as the 19th-century Russian hermit, St. Seraphim of Sarov declared, is the whole purpose of the Christian (therefore a fortiori the monastic) life. St. John Chrysostom says: “As polished silver illumined by the rays of the sun radiates light not only from its own nature but also from the radiance of the sun, so a soul purified by the Divine Spirit becomes more brilliant than silver; it both receives the ray of Divine Glory and from itself reflects the ray of this same glory.” Our true rest, love, purity, vision and quiet is not something in ourselves, it is God the Divine Spirit. Thus we do not “possess” rest, but go out of ourselves into him who is our true rest." - Thomas Merton

"The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter." - Thomas Merton

"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!" - Thomas Merton

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." - Thomas Merton

"Pragmatism is offered as a revolutionary new way of thinking about ourselves and our thoughts, but it is apparently disabled by its own character from offering arguments that might show its suyperiority to the common sense it seeks to displace." - Thomas Nagel

"I know not how it comes to pass, but many are so delighted to hear themselves that they are a cumber to the ears of all other, pleasing their auditors in nothing more than in the pause of a full point." - Thomas Nashe

"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance." - Thomas Paine

"There is a natural firmness in some minds, which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude." - Thomas Paine

"When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name." - Thomas Paine

"I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky

""Self-liberation" is what the Buddhist path is about; it's seeing through the illusion of a separate self and that, I think, attracted us a lot because we were burdened with too much self-the land of individual license plates and special little monads of selfhood buzzing around." - Wes Nisker, fully Wes "Scoop" Nisker

"How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"It's really absurd to make ... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it.... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it." - Willem de Kooning

"You can work and work on a painting but you can't start over again with the canvas like it was before you put that first stroke down. And sometimes, in the end, it's no good, no matter what you do. But with clay, I cover it with a wet cloth and come back to it the next morning and if I don't like what I did, or I changed my mind, I can break it down and start over. It's always fresh." - Willem de Kooning

"We may not understand how the spirit works; but the effect of the spirit on the lives of men is there for all to see. No man can disregard a religion and a faith and a power which is able to make bad men good." - William Barclay

"If [the legislature] will positively enact a thing to be done, the judges are not at liberty to reject it, for that were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government." - William Blackstone, fully Sir William Blackstone

"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire." - William Blake

"Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." - William Blake

"Thou fair-haired angel of the evening, now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown put on, and smile upon our evening bed!" - William Blake

"To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task." - William Congreve

"For 'tis a truth well known to most, that whatsoever thing is lost, we seek it, ere it comes to light, in every cranny but the right." - William Cowper

"Praise enough to fill the ambition of a private man, that Chatham's language was his mother-tongue." - William Cowper

"Prayer makes the Christian's armor bright; And Satan trembles when he sees The weakest saint upon his knees." - William Cowper

"The path of sorrow, and that path alone, leads to the land where sorrow is unknown. No traveler ever reached that blessed abode who found not thorns and briars in his road." - William Cowper