Great Throughts Treasury

"He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything. Life is made up of little things. True greatness consists in being great in little things." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It struck me very deep this afternoon going with a hackney coach from my Lord Treasurer's down Holborne, the coachman I found to drive easily and easily, at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand, and told me that he was suddenly stuck very sick, and almost blind, he could not see. So I 'light and went into another coach with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself lest he should have been struck with the plague, being at the end of town that I took him up; But god have mercy upon us all!" - Samuel Pepys

"If somebody tells you you have ears like a donkey, pay no attention. But if two people tell you, buy yourself a saddle." - Sholem Aleichem, pen name of Sholem Yakovf Rabinowitz or Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich

"In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few… the goal of practice is to always keep your beginner’s mind…For Zen students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our ‘original mind’ includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. If you discriminate too much you limit yourself. If you are too demanding or too greedy, your mind is not rich and self-sufficient. If we lose our original self-sufficient mind, we will lose all precepts. When your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violated in your own precepts: not to tell lies, not to steal, not to kill, not to be immoral, and so forth. If you keep your original mind, the precepts will keep themselves. In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, ‘I have attained something’. All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"So I say, ‘Oh, I am sorry but soon you will see the bright sunrise every morning and beautiful sunset in the evening, every evening, but right now perhaps you…under your situation it may be impossible to see the beautiful sunset or bright sunrise, or beautiful flower in your garden, and it is impossible to take care of your garden, but soon you will see the beauty of the flowers and you will cut some flowers for your room.’ When you start to do this kind of thing you are alright. Don’t worry a bit. It means when you become you, yourself, and when you see things as they are, and when you become at one with your surroundings, in its true sense, there is true self." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"If a person does good, most people will look for ulterior motives. People by training are very suspicious. Because most of the experiences they have had always had a condition attached, they don't expect others will do something just for the sake of doing it. Their belief systems just cannot accept others are capable of doing so. Our language is full of such sayings such as. One hand washes the other. ---You rub my back, I'll rub yours. In the study of one's personal language and self talk it can be observed that what one thinks and talks about to himself tends to become the deciding influences n his life. For what the mind attends to, the mind considers." - Sidney Madwed

"Work and play are an artificial pair of opposites, because the best kind of play contains an element of work, and the most productive kind of work must include something of the spirit of play." - Sydney J. Harris

"A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neorosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Prayer is an excellent training ground for practicing control of one’s thoughts." - Simcha Zissel of Kelm, fully Rabbi imcha Zissel Ziv Broida, aka the Elder of Kelm

"Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror." - Simone Weil

"There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it." - Simone Weil

"Aye, indeed! Hast been brought up at the Abbey then. I could read it from thy reddened cheek and downcast eye, Hast learned from the monks, I trow, to fear a woman as thou wouldst a lazar-house. Out upon them! that they should dishonor their own mothers by such teaching. A pretty world it would be with all the women out of it." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"The shortest, yea, the only way to reach sanctity, is to conceive a horror for all that the world loves and values." - Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola

"After a long spell of prayer, do not say that nothing has been gained, for you have already achieved something. After all, what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and to persevere in unceasing union with Him?" - John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites

"Take a stress pill and think things over-- HAL in 2001" - Stanley Kubrick

"The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, '2001' shows that what some people call 'god' is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call 'god' -Stanley Kubrick, interview, 1963" - Stanley Kubrick

"Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed." - Stephan Jay Gould

"If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates—rather than by slow change in large central populations—then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range. We will first meet the new species as a fossil when it reinvades the ancestral range and becomes a large central population in its own right. During its recorded history in the fossil record, we should expect no major change; for we know it only as a successful, central population. It will participate in the process of organic change only when some of its peripheral isolates species to become new branches on the evolutionary bush. But it, itself, will appear ‘suddenly’ in the fossil record and become extinct later with equal speed and little perceptible change in form." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence." - Stephen Levine

"When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, and our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit, and what matters becomes instantly apparent: the transmission of love; the letting go of obstacles to understanding; the relinquishment of our grasping, of our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. If we take each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy as it arises and experience it fully, life becomes workable. We are no longer a victim of life. And then every experience, even the loss of our dearest one, becomes another opportunity for awakening." - Stephen Levine

"You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity." - Stephen Levine

"Clyde was not one of them, and under such circumstances could not be. He might smile and be civil enough - yet he would always be in touch with those who were above them, would he not - or so they thought. He was, as they saw it, part of the rich and superior class and every poor man knew what that meant. The poor must stand together everywhere." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the loftiest kind thereof comes only of a religious stock - from consciousness of obligation and dependence on God." - Theodore Parker

"Breathing in, there is only the present moment. Breathing out, it is a wonderful moment." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The way to be humble is to look upwards to God. If we think greatly of his majesty, purity, and infinity of all excellence, it will give us such a striking view of our vileness and absolute unworthiness, that we shall think it hardly possible for any to be lower than ourselves." - Thomas Adam

"Who is sufficient for these things? No man is of himself sufficient; even the greatest of men come short of sufficiency. This may make thee then to be affected with insufficiency, who are so far below these men as shrubs are below the tall cedars; and yet they cannot teach it of themselves. Consider the weight of the work, even of preaching, which is all that thou hast to do now. It is the concern of souls. By the foolishness of preaching it pleases the Lord to save them that believe" - Thomas Boston

"In private prayer we have a far greater advantage as so the exercise of our own gifts and graces and parts that we have in public...in public duties we are more passive, but in private duties we are more active. Now, the more our gifts and parts and graces are exercised, the more they are strengthened and increased. All acts strengthen habits. The more sin is acted, the more it is strengthened. And so it is with our gifts and graces; the more they are acted, the more they are strengthened." - Thomas Brooks

"True fame is ever likened to our shade, he sooneth misseth her, that most (haste) hath made to overtake her; whoso takes his wing, regardless of her, she’ll be following; her true proprietie she thus discovers, loves her contemners, and contemns her lovers." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne

"The law of habit when enlisted on the side of righteousness not only strengthens and makes sure our resistance to vice, but facilitates the most arduous performances of virtue. The man whose thoughts, with the purposes and doings to which they lead, are at the bidding of conscience, will, by frequent repetition, at length describe the same track almost spontaneously,—even as in physical education, things laboriously learnt at the first come to be done at last without the feeling of an effort. And so in moral education every new achievement of principle smooths the way to future achievements of the same kind; and the precious fruit or purchase of each moral virtue is to set us on higher and firmer vantage-ground for the conquests of principle in all time coming." - Thomas Chalmers

"There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness." - Thomas Hardy

"The aim of Punishment is not a revenge, but terror." - Thomas Hobbes

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fi fty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson

"I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union." - Thomas Jefferson

"The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety." - Thomas Merton

"Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that's nothing to worry about." - Thomas Nagel

"A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing." - Thomas Nashe

"The self can become a Buddha, a being of perfect wisdom and compassion; and the environment can become a perfect Buddha-land, wherein no one suffers pointlessly and all are there for the happiness of all." - Tibetan Book of the Dead NULL

"One who controls self; he only gets happiness in this world and the next." - Uttaradhyayana Sutra

"To accept what you are is to be content, and contentment is the greatest wealth." - Vimalia McClure

"Consecrate one whole day, and cease to listen to the groans of humanity and the discord of the world, and listen instead to that vast song that is welling up from the depths of the hearts of the redeemed; and blend the voice of thy thought with the immortal strains of Life's unending song. And then, when thou turnest again to humanity, to tell them of the true thoughts that overfill thy consciousness, they shall be indeed such thoughts as "a world's famine feed." - Waldo Pondray Warren

"God having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life,did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer." - Westminster Shorter Catechism, aka Shorter Catechism or Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian NULL

"I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum?" - William Cowper

"Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it's what goes on in the world that reconciles me." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown their uselessness, it will not grudge to any unfamiliar conception its moment of full and friendly attention, hoping to expand rather than to minimize what small core of usefulness it may happen to contain." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"If "freedom" means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom. Without a thoroughgoing solution of this problem there never will be a peace lasting longer than one or two generations. To solve this problem on a social scale, it will take more thinking, more honesty and decency, more conscientiousness, more economic, social and educational changes in social mass living than all the efforts made in previous and future wars and post-war reconstruction programs taken together." - Wilhelm Reich

"We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs." - Wilhelm Reich