Great Throughts Treasury

"To learn the lesson of how to live is more important than any psychic or occult knowledge." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"For the sake of all that is highest, a truthful recognition of this life, and especially of that of it which underlies the fundamental ties of humanity--the love of husband and wife, fatherhood, motherhood--is needed. Religion needs it, now at last alive to the fact that the basis of all true worship is comprised in "the great lesson of reception, neither preference nor denial," interpreting, loving, rejoicing in all that is created, fearing and despising nothing. " - Anne Gilchrist, née Burrows

"I have spent much of the past 25 years working to improve the lives of children. My work has taught me that they need more of our time, energy, and resources. But no experience brought home the lesson as vividly as becoming a mother myself. When Chelsea Victoria Clinton lay in my arms for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the love and responsibility I felt for her. Despite all the books I had read, all the children I had studied and advocated for, nothing had prepared me for the sheer miracle of her being." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"We must learn the difficult lesson that the future of Mankind will only be tolerable when our course, in world affairs as in others, is based upon justice and law rather than the threat of naked power." - Albert Einstein

"What is the significance of the Gita? It is what you find by repeating the word ten times. It is then reversed into 'tagi', which means a person who has renounced everything for God. And the lesson of the Gita is: 'O man, renounce everything and seek God alone.' Whether a man is a monk or a householder, he has to shake off all attachment from his mind." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"Therefore, let us be patient, patient; and let God our Father teach His own lesson, His own way. Let us try to learn it well and quickly; but do not let us fancy that He will ring the school-bell, and send us to play before our lesson is learnt." - Charles Kingsley

"Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility." - Richard Dawkins

"Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation.... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"How melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories are shadows, not substantial things. Truly said the sayer, disappointment is the salt of life a salutary bitter which strengthens the mind for fresh exertion, and gives a double value to the prize." -

"Success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit … The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage. In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time." - Robert Collier

"How melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories are shadows, not substantial things. Truly said the sayer, disappointment is the salt of life a salutary bitter which strengthens the mind for fresh exertion, and gives a double value to the prize." -

"All great change in America begins at the dinner table." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The one thing our Founding Fathers could not foresee -- they were farmers, professional men, businessmen giving of their time and effort to an idea that became a country -- was a nation governed by professional politicians who had an interest in getting re-elected. They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then eagerly looking forward to getting back to the farm." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

"Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.

"Patience and perseverance are never more thoroughly Christian graces than when features of prayer." - Samuel I. Prime, fully Samuel Irenaeus Prime

"You cannot expect that a friend should be like the atmosphere, which confers all manner of benefits upon you, and without which indeed it would be impossible to live, but at the same time is never in your way." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"Anti-essentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status." - Stephan Jay Gould

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

"We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"When I say I believe in a square deal i do not mean ... to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"It seems to me a great truth that human things cannot stand on selfishness, mechanical utilities, economies and law courts; that if there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable, and doomed to ruin." - Thomas Carlyle

"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden...But though an old man, I am but a young gardener." - Thomas Jefferson

"This corporeal globe and everything upon it belong to its present corporeal inhabitants during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves." - Thomas Jefferson

"Him, the vindictive rod of angry justice sent, quick and howling, to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgments, in a fleshy tomb, am buried above ground." - William Cowper

"Men deal with life as children with their play, who first misuse, then cast their toys away." - William Cowper

"The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do, well, that's Memoirs." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured… others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . . and shall master all attachment." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult." - Walter Lippmann

"The market outperformed business for a very long time, and that phenomenon had to end," - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"In discovering something for ourselves, we have a sense of freedom and conquest. In memorizing something that another person tells us and that we do not understand, we are slaves." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored kins, 'thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big bright mouth_; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Self-development begins where self-righteousness ends." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"The wise person replaces toys with medicines." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"One of the many fine things one has to admire is the way the Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion, in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer

"The simple definition of globalization is the interweaving of markets, technology, information systems, and telecommunications networks in a way that is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small. It began decades ago, but accelerated dramatically over the past 10 years, as the price of computing power fell and the world became an ever-more densely interconnected place. People resist this shift — see, for example, the G8 protests of 2001 (one of the bloodiest uprisings in recent European history) or the recent rioting in Pittsburgh at this year’s G20 conference—because they think it primarily benefits big business elites to the detriment of everyone else. But globalization didn’t ruin the world—it just flattened it. And on balance that can benefit everyone, especially the poor. Globalization has pulled millions of people out of poverty in India and China, and multiplied the size of the global middle class. It has raised the global standard of living faster than that at any other time in the history of the world, and it is supporting astounding growth. All world economic activity was valued at $7 trillion in 1950. That’s equal to how much growth took place over just the past decade, even including the recent downturn. Whatever people’s fears of change, globalization is here to stay—and, if properly managed, it will be a good thing." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"All religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"You are what you think are." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"The freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation." - Thucydides NULL

"If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things." - Dan Dennett, fully Daniel Clement "Dan" Dennett

"Every man has a certain sphere of discretion, which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbors. This right flows from the very nature of man. First, all men are fallible: no man can be justified in setting up his judgment as a standard for others. We have no infallible judge of controversies; each man in his own apprehension is right in his decisions; and we can find no satisfactory mode of adjusting their jarring pretensions. If everyone be desirous of imposing his sense upon others, it will at last come to be a controversy, not of reason, but of force. Secondly, even if we had an in fallible criterion, nothing would be gained, unless it were by all men recognized as such. If I were secured against the possibility of mistake, mischief and not good would accrue, from imposing my infallible truths upon my neighbor, and requiring his submission independently of any conviction I could produce in his understanding. Man is a being who can never be an object of just approbation, any further than he is independent. He must consult his own reason, draw his own conclusions and conscientiously conform himself to his ideas of propriety. Without this, he will be neither active, nor considerate, nor resolute, nor generous." - William Godwin

"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view." - William James

"The eyes of a man are of no use without the observing power. Telescopes and microscopes are cunning contrivances, but they cannot see of themselves." - Edwin Paxton Hood