Great Throughts Treasury

"Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"It is not merely that we want to see the game played fairly. We also want to see the rules changed, so that there shall be both less opportunity and less temptation to cheat, and less chance for some few people to gain a pro?t to which either they are not entitled at all, or else which is so enormous as to be greatly in excess of what they deserve, even though their services have been great. We wish to do away with the pro?t that comes from the illegitimate exercise of cunning and craft. We also wish to secure a measurable equality of opportunity, a measurable equality of reward for services of similar value. To do all this, two, mutually supplementary movements are necessary. On the one hand, there must be - I think there now is - a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words count only when they give expression to deeds, or are to be translated into them. The leaders of the Red Terror prattled of peace while they steeped their hands in the blood of the innocent; and many a tyrant has called it peace when he has scourged honest protest into silence. Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others." - Thomas Carlyle

"Silent? ah, he is silent! He can keep silence well. That man's silence is wonderful to listen to." - Thomas Hardy

"I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, is regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature's God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them. God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon. But infidelity by ascribing every phenomenon to properties of matter, conceives a system for which it cannot account, and yet it pretends to demonstration. It reasons from what it sees on the surface of the earth, but it does not carry itself on the solar system existing by motion. It sees upon the surface a perpetual decomposition and recomposition of matter. It sees that an oak produces an acorn, an acorn an oak, a bird an egg, an egg a bird, and so on. In things of this kind it sees something which it calls a natural cause, but none of the causes it sees is the cause of that motion which preserves the solar system." - Thomas Paine

"It is not beyond actual possibilities that men from outer space have landed (or will in the future land) on earth and have begun to breed here for whatever reason they may have had." - Wilhelm Reich

"Of the terrible doubt of appearances, of the uncertainty after all, that we may-be deluded, that may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, that may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only. May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, the skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Thought of obedience, faith, adhesiveness; as I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in men." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight." - Wendell Berry

"He had nothing he could do with is life's work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it." - Wendell Berry

"Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them." - Victor Hugo

"It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys. Take as an example something that happened on our journey from Auschwitz to the camp affiliated with Dachau… When we arrived the first important news that we heard from older prisoners was that this comparatively small camp… had no 'oven,' no crematorium, no gas!... This joyful surprise put us all in a good mood... We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all we had to go through in the next few hours." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be a surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He was a surgeon and had once been an assistant on the staff of a large hospital. So I once tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work. On the building site (especially when the supervisor made his tour of inspection) the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting: 'Action! Action!' I told my friend, 'One day you will be back in the operating room, performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, Action! Action!'" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Abuse of any one generally shows that he has marked traits of character. The stupid and indifferent are passed by in silence." - Tryon Edwards

"I wake up in the morning and I see that flower, with the dew on its petals, and at the way it's folding out, and it makes me happy, she said. It's important to focus on the things in the here and now, I think. In a month, the flower will be shriveled and you will miss its beauty if you don't make the effort to do it now. Your life, eventually, is the same way." - Dan Buettner

"But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points." - William James

"It is wonderful how near conceit is to insanity!" - Douglas William Jerrold

"For the benefit of the flowers, we water the thorns, too." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Popular beliefs on essential matters must be examined in order to discover the original thought." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Democritus introduces the intellect having an argument with the senses about what is 'real'." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet." - Felix Adler