Great Throughts Treasury

"In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others. It is not only unjust but also an irrational element which distorts all relationships within the enterprise." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Pollution must be brought under control and mankind's population and consumption of resources must be steered towards a permanent and sustainable equilibrium." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"We are, I believe, at the moment in grave danger of missing the 'path to perfection'." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"He (a new philosopher) still needs to be taught, not this time philosophy, but to philosophize." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"The true reason why this universe appears to some scientists as mysterious is that, mistaking existential, that is, metaphysical, questions for scientific ones, they ask science to answer them. Naturally, they get no answers. Then they are puzzled, and they say that the universe is mysterious." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"Through this intellect, every man is a person and through the same intellect he can see exactly the same truth as any other man can see, provided they both use their intellects in the proper way. Here, and nowhere else, lies the foundation for the very possibility of a philosophia perennis; for it is, not a perennial cloud floating through the ages in some metaphysical stratosphere, but the permanent possibility for each and every human being to actualize an essence through his own existence, that is to experience again the same truth in the light of his own intellect. And that truth itself is not an anonymous one. Even taken in its absolute and self-subsisting form, truth itself bears a name. Its name is God." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"It frequently happens that the imagination produces even such effects within us, as might seem to proceed from present reflection. Though we may be greatly taken up with a particular idea, yet the objects which surround us, continue to solicit our senses; the perceptions they occasion, revive others with which they are connected; and these determine certain movements in our bodies." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"What we have been saying in regard to imagination and memory, must be applied to contemplation, according as it is referred to either. If it be made to consist in retaining the perceptions; before the use of instituted signs it has only a habit which does not depend on us: but it has none at all, if it be made to consist in preserving the signs themselves." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While" to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time." - Eudora Welty

"Instead of asking, “Why does this happen Why do I feel left in the lurch” we can ask “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’”" - Eugene Peterson

"A credulous, religious-minded fool, as I've pointed out! And he carried his credulity into the next period of his life, where he believed in one social or philosophical Ism after another, always on the trial of Truth! He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life in unimportant and meaningless. No. He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find and excuse for going on!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"As the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The great task of life is to learn the will of the Lord and then do it." - Ezra Taft Benson

"I was completely surrounded by religion from a young time. I was taught by my father. I engaged in discussions with him and many of these scholars who visited and came around the dining table, the lunch table, and attended many lectures with my dad. And so I learned the apprentice way." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown." - Felix Adler

"No one perceives where the shoe pinches but he who wears it." - Italian Proverbs

"The gallows will have its own at last." - Italian Proverbs

"Trouble shared is trouble halved." - Italian Proverbs

"When a wife sins the husband is never innocent." - Italian Proverbs

"Where there is nothing to gain, there is a lot to lose." - Italian Proverbs

"I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered his hopes completely." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off)." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien