Great Throughts Treasury

"While striving for the realization of God, the aspirant has to practice renunciation, applying the logic of 'Neti, neti'" - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices." - Remy de Gourmont

"There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. " - Richard Shaull, fully Reverend M. Richard Shaull

"Our argument ... will result, not upon logic by itself--though without logic we should never have got to this point--but upon the fortunate contingent fact that people who would take this logically possible view, after they had really imagined themselves in the other man's position, are extremely rare." - Richard M. Hare, fully Richard Mervyn Hare

"How should scientists respond to the allegation that our 'faith' in logic and scientific truth is just that - faith - not 'privileged' (the favorite in-word) over alternative truths? A minimal response is that science gets results." - Richard Dawkins

"These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one's heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts God " - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience." - Rita Mae Brown

"Try some Symbolic Logic on your little Couch Potato when you go home, and see what happens." - Robertson Davies

"As we have seen, an adaptive challenge consists of a gap between the shared values people hold and the reality of their lives, or of a conflict among people in a community over values or strategy. 1. What’s causing the distress? 2. What internal contradictions does the distress represent? 3. What are the histories of these contradictions? 4. What perspectives and interests have I and others come to represent to various segments of the community that are now in conflict? 5. In what ways are we in the organization or working group mirroring the problem dynamics in the community?" - Ronald A. Heifetz

"Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could." - Samuel Butler

"If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything" - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive." - Sidney Hook

"Dame Ermyntrude Loring, wife, and mother of warriors, was herself a formidable figure. Tall and gaunt, with hard craggy features and intolerant dark eyes, even her snow-white hair and stooping back could not entirely remove the sense of fear which she inspired in those around her. Her thoughts and memories went back to harsher times, and she looked upon the England around her as a degenerate and effeminate land which had fallen away for the old standard of knightly courtesy and valor." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"If I could be assured of your destruction, i would in the interest of the public, cheerfully accept my death." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"If the neck of the giraffe elongates an inch at a time, then the full panoply of supporting structures need not arise at every step. The coordinated adaptation can be built piecemeal. Some animals may slightly elongate the neck, others the legs; still others may develop stronger neck muscles. By sexual reproduction, the favorable features of different organisms may be combined in offspring." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Dissonance is the truth about harmony." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Life has become the ideology of its own absence." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"It in the common wonder of all men among so many millions of faces there should be none alike." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne

"Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." - Thomas Jefferson

"The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error." - Thomas Merton

"The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God." - Thomas Merton

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist... most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." - Thomas Merton

"All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation." - Susan Sontag

"If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato." - Wendell Berry

"People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food." - Wendell Berry

"We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do." - Wendell Berry

"He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman." - Walker Percy

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior." - Vannevar Bush

"When men are once checked in what they consider their special excellence, their whole opinion of themselves suffers more than if they had not at first believed in their superiority, the unexpected shock to their pride causing them to give way more than their real strength warrants; and that is probably now the case with the Athenians." - Thucydides NULL

"If today I had a young mind to direct, to start on the journey of life, and I was faced with the duty of choosing between the natural way of my forefathers and that of the...present way of civilization, I would, for its welfare, unhesitatingly set that child's feet in the path of my forefathers. I would raise him to be an Indian!" - Tom Brown, Jr.

"If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse." - Emil M. Cioran

"We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?" - Emma Goldman

"End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit?may the hair on his toes never fall out!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien