Great Throughts Treasury

"The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself… not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps trans-humanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature… I believe in trans-humanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

"Religion… shall mean for us, the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." - William James

"Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual… bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community." - William James

"There exists a continuum of consciousness uniting individual minds that could be directly experienced if the psychophysical threshold of perception were sufficiently lowered through refinement in the functioning nervous system." - William James

"This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else." - William James

"This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute, and we become aware of our oneness." - William James

"Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thought." -

"No individual or people can achieve anything without industry, suffering and sacrifice." - Fatima Jinna, also known as Madr-e-Millat, mother of the nation

"As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else… Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and time again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. This, however, is a truth which only profits the man who is temperamentally convinced of the individual and irreducible reality of his fellow man." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"An individual does not comprehend his or her self as a linear sequence – a succession of roles or a trajectory of “socialize” beings, learning and then acting out (or deviating from) a set of socially appropriate rules of behavior. Moreover, identity in old age is not merely the sum of the parts, whether roles, achievements, losses, or social norms. Instead, people dynamically integrate a wide range of experience – unique situations, structural forces, values, cultural pathways, knowledge of an entire life span – to construct a current and viable identity." - Sharon R. Kaufman

"The construction of a coherent, unified sense of self is an ongoing process. We have seen how old people express an identity through themes which are rooted in personal experience, particular structural factors, and a constellation of value orientations. Themes integrate these three sources of meaning as they structure the account of a life, express what is salient to the individual, and define a continuous and creative self." - Sharon R. Kaufman

"The focus on themes in the lives of the elderly allows us to conceive of aging as continual creation of the self through the ongoing interpretation of past experience, structural factors, values, and current context…. Identity is built around themes, without regard to time, as past experiences are symbolically connected with one another to have meaning for a particular individual." - Sharon R. Kaufman

"The moment you have protected an individual, you have protected society." - Kenneth Kaunda, fully Kenneth David Kaunda

"For God can only be found after everything that is in the way has been cleared away, every finitude and above all, the individual himself in his finitude and his disputatiousness in the face of God." -

"Nature, the totality of created things, is the work of God. And yet God is not there; but within the individual man there is a potentiality (man is potentially spirit) which is awakened in inwardness to become a God-relationship, and then it becomes possible to see God everywhere." -

"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its justice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"What education is to the individual, revelation is to the whole human race." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"If each man relies on his individual reason for his religious beliefs, the result will be anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty." - Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre

"The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects… The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind." - Everett Dean Martin

"Sin is not exhausted in describing individual acts which aren’t very nice. “Sin” is fundamentally a description of our entire situation, one of separation from God, alienation from him, arising out of our rebellion, our refusal to do his will, our insistence upon the following of our wills." - James A. Martin, Jr.

"The ideal government… is one which lets the individual alone one which barely escapes being no government at all." -

"Man was first created a single individual to teach the lesson that whoever destroys one life, Scripture ascribes it to him as though he had destroyed a whole world; and whoever saves one life, Scripture ascribes it to him as though he had saved a whole world." - Mishnah or The Mishnah NULL

"Morality is herd instinct in the individual." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Toleration… is not true liberty when it is only a gracious concession by the state to the individual. Gracious concessions are incompatible with liberty of religion which is not something that a state, or an absolutist church offers, but that which the citizen claims and the law protects." - Cecil Northcott

"To seek to give life meaning is to seek to transcend the limits of one’s individual life." - Robert Nozick

"Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility." -

"When we dispute over dogmas we are divided. But when we take to the religious life of prayer and contemplation, we are brought together. The deeper the prayers, the more is the individual lost in the apprehension of the Supreme." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"Every vocation is ultimately founded on the salutary selfishness by which an individual, despite the whole world, seeks to save his own immortal soul." -

"An expansion of the individual consciousness toward a harmony with Infinite Consciousness demands of the individual that he take on, commensurately, other characteristics of his Creator." - Leonard E. Read

"The highest goal of mankind is the liberty of the individual." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan

"The nidus [nest] of the malady from which our civilization suffers lies in the individual soul and is only to be overcome within the individual soul." - Wilhelm Röepke

"The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people… It’s more useful to think of every other person as another you - to think of every individual as a representative of the universe." - Rolling Thunder, born Louis Belmont Newell NULL

"Not through imitating nor yet through loving any mere individual human being can we be saved, but ony through loyalty to the “Beloved Community.”" - Josiah Royce

"Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family." - Virginia Satir

"Within the limits of the physical laws of nature, we are still masters of our individual and collective destiny, for good or ill." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The spiritual and moral perfection of the individual… is the final end of civilization." - Albert Schweitzer

"Each man’s nature in one way and another is vitally associated with the life and well-being of every other individual in the world and what affects one must in some degree affect the rest of humanity." - Baird T. Spalding

"“To believe your own thought,” observed Emerson, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.” But to impose what you believe is true for you upon all men, indeed upon a single individual – that is despotism." -

"The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world." -

"The meaning of life must be in the living of it. This is because, (a) in a sense, the meaning of one’s life is oneself, and (b) it is the person that has primary non-instrumental value. The individual has value and, consequently, so does his or her life and so do the processes that constitute that life. The finite processes of life have meaning, without the need of the Absolute." - Garrett Thomson

"In the creative vision of God the individual is present as a whole in his essential being and inner teleos and at the same time in the infinity of the special moments of his life process. Of course this is said symbolically, since we are unable to have a perception of or even an imagination of that which belongs to the divine life. The mystery of being beyond essence and existence is hidden in the mystery of the creativity of the divine life." -

"I believe that the true welfare of man lies in the fulfillment of the Will of God; and that His will consists in men loving each other, and therefore behaving toward others as they desire that others should behave with them. I believe that the meaning of life of every man, therefore, lies only in the increase of love in himself; that this increase of love leads the individual man in this life toward greater and greater welfare; that after death it gives the greater welfare the more love there be in the man; and that, at the same time, more than anything else, it contributes to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, i.e., to an order of life where the discord, deceit, and violence which now reign will be replaced by free agreement, truth, and brotherly love between men." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

"Love is the essence of the soul, and must be strengthened and cleansed of ill-feeling, irritation, irony, against every individual." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

"In the degree, however, that you come into a vital realization of your oneness with the Infinite Spirit of Life, whence all life in individual form has come and is continually coming, and in the degree that through this realization you open yourself to its divine inflow, you set into operation forces that will sooner or later bring even the physical body into a state of abounding health and strength. For to realize that this Infinite Spirit of Life can from its very nature admit of no disease, and to realize that this, then, is the life in you, by realizing your oneness with it, you can so open yourself to its more abundant entrance that the diseased bodily conditions - effects - will respond to the influences of its all-perfect power, this either quickly or more tardily, depending entirely on yourself." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Committee: A structured decision-making body in which the level of collective judgment is lower than that of any individual member." -

"The shallow… consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to human life." -

"The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual – namely to You." -