Great Throughts Treasury

"Law is experience developed by reason and applied continually to further experience." - Roscoe Pound, fully Nathan Roscoe Pound

"Consider the reason of the case, for nothing is law that is not reason." - John Powell, fully Sir John Powell

"Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness." - Jean Racine, baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine

"The influences that really make and mar human happiness are beyond the reach of the law." - Walter Rauschenbusch

"There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics." - J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

"The question is, whether, like the Divine Child I the temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father’s business, and becoming wise to God." -

"What is a miracle? The natural law of a unique event." - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

"Law being purely the declaration of the general will, it is clear that, in the exercise of the legislative power, the people cannot be represented; but in that of the executive power, which is only the force that is applied to giver the law effect, it both can and should be represented." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"No more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Politicians cannot afford to deal in finalities and ultimate truths; they abide, by and large, by probabilities and reasonable assumptions and the law of averages." - Richard Rovere

"As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"The reason of the law is the law." -

"Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because it is an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell me how to confute him." - John Selden

"The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony." - V. S. Seturaman

"Mind set free in the Dharma-realm, I sit at the moon-filled window Watching the mountains with my ears, Hearing the stream with open eyes. Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra: The most fleeting thought is timeless, A single hair's enough to stir the sea." - Ryushu Shutaku

"An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men." - Ignazio Silone , original name Secondo Transqulli

"As the love of God is man's highest happiness and blessedness, and the ultimate end and aim of all human actions, it follows that he alone lives by the Divine law who loves God not from fear of punishment, or from love of any other object... but solely because he has knowledge of God." -

"Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction." - Max Stirner, born Johann Kaspar Schmidt

"Old age is not one of the beauties of creation, but it is one of its harmonies. The law of contrasts is one of the laws of beauty. Under the conditions of our climate, shadow gives light its worth; sternness enhances mildness; solemnity, splendor. Varying proportions of size support and subserve one another." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

"Love is not a mere impulse, it must contain truth, which is law." -

"The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love." -

"Do you know the first law of human nature? Self-propagation." - James Thurber and Elliott Nugent

"To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free from dependence on cause." -

"When a people lose respect for one bad law, it is but a short step before they include the good laws with the bad and are shortly in rebellion against all law." - Oscar W. Underwood, fully Oscar Wilder Underwood

"It is untrue that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality; its sovereign law is subordination and dependence." -

"The idea of bringing all men on an equality with each other has always been a pleasant dream; the law cannot equalize men in spite of nature." -

"The criminal law is not founded on the principle of vengeance; it uses evil only as a means of preventing greater evil." - Daniel Webster

"The law is made to protect the innocent by punishing the guilty." - Daniel Webster

"Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form - no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires, the sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; to frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, with grass and flower and fruits and corn." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"In its purest form music is not a representational but rather a nonobjective, nonverbal world, it is a world of its own, almost a creatio ex hihilo, an occasion for immediacy of experience, a nonreducible mode of beauty, of contrast and resolution, of order and ecstasy flowing through and beyond the order. Order, and ecstasy rooted in order: that sounds like the relation between law and love, law and gospel." - James Luther Adams

"No matter! – so long as the world is the work of eternal goodness, and so long as conscience has not deceived us – to give happiness, and to do good, there is our only law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon light, our reason for existing. All religions may crumble away; so long as this survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Human law has the true nature of law only in so far as it corresponds to the right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. In so far as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"Spend your brief moment according to nature’s law, and serenely greet the journey’s end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life." -

"Not only to see and find the Divine in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one’s own individual liberation and perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being." -

"Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion." - William Blake

"If justice is the end of the law, the law the work of the prince, and the prince the image of god, it follows of necessity that the law of the prince should be modeled on the law of God." - Jean Bodin

"Remember the eternal law: you must give, if you want to get." - Subhas Chandra Bose, aka Netaji

"Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love. This is an unalterable law." -

"He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquility, is free from fear and sin, while he drinks in the nectar of the Law." -

"That great Law of Nature, Self-Preservation." - Samuel Butler

"Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality." - Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister

"The origin of justice is to be sought in the divine law of eternal and immutable morality." -

"The safety of the people shall be their highest law." -

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting." -

"Until a man realizes sin as the death of his own higher self and as a rebellion against the law of his true happiness, there is no true conversion of heart towards the higher life." - Father Cuthbert

"The great moral reformers have usually found the greatest opposition not in the “immoral” and impulsive individual, but in the regularly constituted organs of social authority and law." - Christopher Henry Dawson

"Hatred does not cease by hatred; hated ceases only by love. This is the eternal law." - Dhammapada NULL

"Hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This a law eternal." -

"Compassion is the chief law of human existence." -

"Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?" - James W. Douglass