Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Opinion

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition." - Thucydides NULL

"When night came on, the Macedonians and the barbarian crowd suddenly took fright in one of those mysterious panics to which great armies are liable." - Thucydides NULL

"A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail." - Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett

"DON PEDRO: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick. BEATRICE: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it. DON PEDRO: You have put him down, lady, you have put him down. BEATRICE: So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove the mother of fools. Much Ado About Nothing, Act ii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Some associations may revivify it enough to make it flash, after a long oblivion, into consciousness." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him." - William James

"Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree." - William James

"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way." - William James

"Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting." - William James

"The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals." - William James

"The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition, — the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it." - William James

"We keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can." - William James

"Epicurus, we are told, left behind him three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro’s own words that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca assures us that Didymus the grammarian wrote no less than four thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen were wrought up: sound thoughts and well-matured reflections could have no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier is it to write than to think! But shall I not myself, Palamedes, prove an instance that it is so, if I suspend any longer your own more important reflections by interrupting you with such as mine?" - William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne

"The shame that arises from praise which we do not deserve often makes us do things we should otherwise never have attempted." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"It is necessary to form a distinct notion of what is meant by the word volition in order to understand the import of the word will; for this last word expresses the power of mind of which volition is the act." - 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

"Those who practice only in silence/tranquility, cannot establish their [internal] freedom when entering into activity. When they engage into worldy activities, their usual satori (enlightment) will eventually disappear without any trace."" - Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL

"Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying, everything except itself. It has made possible the tremendous modern development of power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work to apply them; that the difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline." - Elihu Root

"If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings." - Albert Einstein

"She hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in Ethiope's ear." - William Shakespeare

"Italian men are like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Moreover, no one is judged from the natural man, thus not so long as he lives in the natural world, for man is then in a natural body; but everyone is judged in the spiritual man, and therefore when he comes into the spiritual world, for man is then in a spiritual body." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly." - Emile Zola

"Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion! Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust." - Emile Zola

"The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land." - Emma Goldman

"What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!" - Emma Goldman

"We who are prosperous and independent have not sufficient homogeneity to champion on the ground of a common creed, common stock, a common history, a common heritage of misfortune, the rights of the lowest and poorest Jew-peddler who flees, for life and liberty of thought, from Slavonic mobs." - Emma Lazarus

"But come, examine by every means each thing how it is clear, neither putting greater faith in anything seen than in what is heard, nor in a thundering sound more than in the clear assertions of the tongue, nor keep from trusting any of the other members in which there lies means of knowledge, but know each thing in the way in which it is clear." - Empedocles NULL

"At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"A prison is a cross section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force." - Euripedes NULL

"Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves." - Eustace Budgell

"During the civil wars there appeared one, which makes too great a figure in story to be passed over in silence; I mean that of the redoubted Hudibras, an account of which Butler has transmitted to posterity in the following lines:" - Eustace Budgell

"I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"t is better to ride a donkey that carries you than a horse that throws you." - Italian Proverbs

"There is no beard so well shaven but another barber will find something more to shave from it." - Italian Proverbs

"Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly