Great Throughts Treasury

"There is nothing that can be called a “Self,” and there is no such thing as “mine” in all the world." - Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL

"Nothing conveys a more inaccurate idea of a whole truth than a part of a truth so prominently brought forth as to throw the other parts into shadow. This is the art of caricature." -

"Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it." -

"You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." - Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL

"Do what you are doing now, suffer what you are suffering now; to do all this with holiness, nothing need be changed but your hearts. Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God’s order." -

"Whoever undertakes a long Journey, if he be wise, makes it his Business to find out an agreeable Companion. How cautious then should He be, who is to take a Journey for Life, whose Fellow-Traveler must not part with him but at the Grave; his Companion at Bed and Board and Sharer of all the Pleasures and Fatigues of his Journey; as the Wife must be to the Husband! She is no such Sort of Ware, that a Man can be rid of when he pleases: When once that’s purchas’d, no Exchange, no Sale, no Alienation can be made: She is an inseparable Accident to Man: Marriage is a Noose, which, fasten’d about the Neck, runs the closer, and fits more uneasy by our struggling to get loose: ‘Tis a Gordian Knot which none can unty, and being twisted with our Thread of Life, nothing but the Schyth of Death can cut it." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything valuable has a compensating power. Not a blade of grass that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something." - Thomas Chalmers

"I see nothing worth living for but the divine virtue which endures and surrenders all things for truth, duty, and mankind." - William Ellery Channing

"Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing?" - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of generous emotion." -

"We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of." -

"Be grateful to the man who cares nothing for your remorse. You are his equal." - René Char

"If you do not rise early, you can make progress in nothing." - William Pitt, Lord Chatham or Lord William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, aka The Elder Pitt and The Great Commander

"Moderation, which consists in an indifference about little things, and in a prudent and well-proportioned zeal about things of importance, can proceed from nothing but true knowledge, which has its foundation in self-acquaintance." - William Pitt, Lord Chatham or Lord William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, aka The Elder Pitt and The Great Commander

"All beginnings are difficult, but there is nothing that stands in the way when you have a strong will to accomplish. The essential thing is to be sincerely resolved to be successful." - Chazon Ish, named Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance." -

"Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man; it effects nothing it goes about; and hurts the man who is possessed by it more directly than any other against whom it is directed." - Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

"Nothing can allay the rage of biting envy." -

"A modern commentator made the observation that there re those who seek knowledge about everything and understand nothing. It is wonder - not mere curiosity - a sense of enchantment, of respect for the mysteries of love for the other, that is essential to the difference between a knowing that is simply a gathering of information and techniques and a knowing that seeks insight and understanding. It is wonder that reveals how intimate is the relationship between knowledge of the other and knowledge of the self, between inwardness and outwardness." - Seymour Cohen, fully Seymour Jay Cohen

"The wise man loves to believe nothing; the simple man to believe all things. The latter is credulous to others, the former to himself." - W. G. Cole

"Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People that have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company." - Jeremy Collier

"You read of but one wise man; and all that he knew was - that he knew nothing." - William Congreve

"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

"Example often is nothing but a mirror that deceives." - Pierre Cornielle

"He that knows nothing doubts nothing." - Randle Cotgrave

"How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us. Stay close to the heart of nature and forget his troubled world. Remember, there is nothing wrong with nature, the trouble is in ourselves." - Parks Cousins

"Politeness is nothing more than an elegant and concealed species of flattery, tending to put the person to whom it is addressed in good humor and respect with himself." -

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." -

"A treaty, in the minds of our people, is an eternal word. Events often make it seem expedient to depart from the pledged word, but we are conscious that the first departure creates a logic for the second departure, until there is nothing left of the word." - Declaration of Indian Purpose NULL

"One crime is everything; two nothing." - Madame Deluzy, Luzy Dorothee

"There is nothing to do with men but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness." - Orville Dewey

"It often requires more strength and judgment to resist than to embrace an opportunity. It is better to do nothing than to do other than well." - Sydney Dobell, fully Sydney Thompson Dobell

"A man who bows down to nothing can never bear the burden of himself." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"There is nothing so elastic as the human mind. Like imprisoned steam, the more it is pressed the more it rises to resist the pressure. The more we are obliged to do, the more we are able to accomplish." - Tyron Edwards

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing." - Albert Einstein

"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone." -

"When a person feels sad because someone did not show him respect or give him approval, he can say to himself, “What will I really gain if this person does show me respect or does approve of me? What do I really lose by his insulting me?” The answer is: Nothing! Both honor and humiliation are very temporary states, and rarely make practical differences in our lives. So why upset yourself because someone failed to honor you? If a person will internalize the truth of this concept, he will never feel sad about lack of honor or approval." - Moshe Eliyashuv

"The lazy man aims at nothing, and generally hits it." -

"Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives or systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves - two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject." - Friedrich Engels

"Faults will turn to good, provided we use them to our own humiliation, without slackening in the effort to correct ourselves. Discouragement serves no possible purpose; it is simply the despair of wounded self-love. The real way of profiting by the humiliation of one’s own faults is to face them in their true hideousness, without ceasing to hope in God, while hoping nothing from self." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others as by self-examination thoroughly to know our own." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"True piety hath in it nothing weak, nothing sad, nothing constrained. It enlarges the heart; it is simple, free and attractive." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"Perhaps the summary of good-breeding may be reduced to this rule. “Behave unto all men as you would they should behave to you.” This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them." - Henry Fielding

"Those who think they have nothing to give should always remember that they can always give themselves, and that they can always render some kind of service even if it be nothing more than a few words of cheer." - Lowell Fillmore

"We live in an age to which self-restraint is hateful. Our emphasis is placed on achievement. Restraint without achievement is nothing, but achievement without restraint is worse." - Ralph Tyler Flewelling

"Everything exists, nothing has value." - E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster