Great Throughts Treasury

"The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers... We are impatient of state legislatures because they seem to us less representative of the thoughtful opinion of the country than Congress is. We know that our legislatures do not think alike, but we are not sure that our people do not think alike..." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"A merry heart goes all the day, your sad tires in a mile-a. A Winter’s Tale, Act iv, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare

"All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him by inch-meal a disease! The tempest, act ii, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"Ay, but hearken, sir; though the chameleon Love can feed on the air, I am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have meat." - William Shakespeare

"The lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase, it’s a fundamental law. The message from marketing is that your brand is more dispersed, you can’t fight it, so embrace it and try to find a way to work with it." - Dan Cobley

"Books have been handed down from generation to generation, as the true teachers of piety and the love of God, that represent him as so merciless and tyrannical a despot, that, if they were considered otherwise than through the medium of prejudice, they could inspire nothing but hatred. It seems that the impression we derive from a book, depends much less on its real contents, than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it." - William Godwin

"Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil." - William Godwin

"It is the property of truth to diffuse itself." - William Godwin

"There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape." - William Godwin

"Remember, we do not mount the pulpit to say fine things, or eloquent things, we have there to proclaim the good tidings of salvation to fallen men; to point out the way of eternal life; to exhort, to cheer and support the suffering sinner; these are the glorious topics upon which we have to enlarge -- and will these permit the tricks of oratory, or the studied beauties of eloquence? Shall truths and counsels like these be couched in terms which the poor and ignorant cannot comprehend? Let all eloquent preachers beware lest they fill any man's ear with sounding words, when they should be feeding his soul with the bread of everlasting life! -- Let them fear lest instead of honouring God, they honour themselves! If any man ascend the pulpit with the intention of uttering A Fine Thing, he is committing a deadly sin." - William Gouge

"In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors." - William James

"The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself." - William James

"The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact." - William James

"The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity." - William James

"The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one." - William James

"To my way of thinking there's something wrong, or missing, with any person who hasn't got a soft spot in their hearts for an animal of some kind." - William James

"True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot." - William James

"Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?" - William James

"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance." - William Matthews

"For the attainment of correctness and purity in the use of words, the rules of grammarians and critics may be a sufficient guide; but it is not in the works of this class of authors that the higher beauties of style are to be studied. As the air and manner of a gentleman can be acquired only by living habitually in the best society, so grace in composition must be attained by an habitual acquaintance with classical writers. It is, indeed, necessary for our information that we should peruse occasionally many books which have no merit in point of expression; but I believe it to be extremely useful to all literary men to counteract the effect of this miscellaneous reading by maintaining a constant and familiar acquaintance with a few of the most faultless models which the language affords. For want of some standard of this sort we frequently see an author’s taste in writing alter much to the worse, in the course of his life; and his later productions fall below the level of his early essays. D’Alembert tells us that Voltaire had always lying on his table the Petit Caréme of Massillon and the tragedies of Racine; the former to fix his taste in prose composition, and the latter in poetry." - Dugald Stewart

"Mr. Hume sometimes employs (after the manner of the French metaphysicians) sentiment as synonymous with feeling,—a use of the word quite unprecedented in our tongue." - Dugald Stewart

"The business of conception is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have, moreover, a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our own creation. I shall employ the word imagination to express this power, and I apprehend that this is the proper sense of the word, if imagination be the power which gives birth to the productions of the poet and the painter. The operations of imagination are by no means confined to the materials which conception furnishes, but may be equally employed about all the subjects of our knowledge." - Dugald Stewart

"We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki

"Buddhist temples are of three types. I. Temples which are strictly Mahāyāna. These are temples where bodhisattva monks who are new to training reside. II. Temples which are strictly HÄ«nayāna. These are temples where only the HÄ«nayāna and vinaya teachers reside. III. Temples where both Mahāyāna and HÄ«nayāna practice together. These are temples where bodhisattva monks who have trained for a long time reside. Now in the Tendai Lotus School the annual ordinands [candidates for ordination] are all new practitioners who have all directed their minds to the Mahāyāna and for twelve years will be made to reside deep in the mountains at the temple Shishu Sanmai-in 四種三昧院. Upon completion of their training they will provisionally receive the lesser [HÄ«nayāna] precepts as it benefits others and they will be permitted to provisionally reside in a temple where both [Mahāyāna and HÄ«nayāna] practices are carried out." - Saichō NULL

"Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment" - Edwin Percy Whipple

"All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it." - Edwin Way Teale

"The only thing that is humiliating is helplessness." - Egyptian Proverbs

"It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it." - Elias Canetti

"Addiction is typical in all love stories based on infatuation." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Meditation vs. Prayer = Listening vs. Talking" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The culture of Rome just doesn't match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I've decided that Rome and Yoga don't have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word toga." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Phosphorescence. Now there's a word to lift your hat to — to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"That... which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least, for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Nothing responds to us, but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"While in moral pain one can preserve an attitude of dignity and compunction , and consequently already be free; physical suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. It is the very irremissibility of being." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"Silent prayer is more powerful than audible prayer, because by silent prayer the mind comes closer to creative Spirit." - Emmet Fox

"You should never "put up" with anything. You should never be willing to accept less than Health, Harmony, and Happiness. These things are your Divine Right as the sons and daughters of God, and it is only a bad habit, unconscious, as a rule, that causes you to be satisfied with less. In the depths of his being man always feels intuitively that there is a way out of his difficulties if only he can find it, and his natural instincts all point in the same direction." - Emmet Fox

"And so the arrival at new possibility, at new reality, by the de­struction of the self through facing up to the anxiety of the terror of existence. The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to "die," in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures. Our modern understanding of psycho-dynamics confirms that this progression is very logical: if you admit that you are a creature, you accomplish one basic thing: you demolish all your unconscious power linkages or supports. As we saw in the last chapter—and it is worth repeating here—each child grounds himself in some power that transcends him. Usually it is a combination of his parents, his social group, and the symbols of his society and nation. This is the unthinking web of support which allows him to believe in himself, as he functions on the automatic security of delegated powers. He doesn't of course admit to himself that he lives on borrowed powers, as that would lead him to ques­tion his own secure action, the very confidence that he needs. He has denied his creatureliness precisely by imagining that he has secure power, and this secure power has been tapped by unconsciously leaning on the persons and things of his society. Once you expose the basic weakness and emptiness of the person, his help­lessness, then you are forced to re-examine the whole problem of power linkages. You have to think about reforging them to a real source of creative and generative power. It is at this point that one can begin to posit creatureliness vis-a-vis a Creator who is the First Cause of all created things, not merely the second-hand, inter­mediate creators of society, the parents and the panoply of cultural heroes. These are the social and cultural progenitors who them­selves have been caused, who themselves are embedded in a web of someone else's powers." - Ernest Becker

"Our vocal music is so greatly different from our common recitation or declamatory speaking, that the imagination is not easily imposed upon by our musical tragedies." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"There were two reasons why persons of any abilities, that attempted this kind of music, could not help meeting with success. The first is, that without doubt they pitched upon such pieces, as in the course of reciting, they had been accustomed to render particularly expressive; or at least they imagined some such. The second is the surprise, which this music must needs have produced by its novelty. The greater the surprise she greater the impression of the music." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"The happiness is the happiness that seems complete, and that s' announcement as permanent for and say." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal