Great Throughts Treasury

"Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness." - Samuel Butler

"We send organizers to the south and instead of being permitted to talk to the negroes . . . our organizers have been mistreated and driven out of towns. . . .If we get no chance to deal with the negroes we can do nothing for them." - Samuel Gompers

"An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing." - Samuel Smiles

"A fire devours all that is fed into it but the fire does not change its nature. Similarly, a great personality does not fall from his position by an irregularity in behavior." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL

"Poor is the man who does not know his own intrinsic worth and tends to measure everything by relative value. A man of financial wealth who values himself by his financial net worth is poorer than a poor man who values himself by his intrinsic self-worth." - Sidney Madwed

"Young people know less than we do, but they understand more; their perception has not yet been blunted by compromise, fatigue, rationalization, and the mistaking of mere respectability for morality." - Sydney J. Harris

"I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest, but we have not altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother's relations to her male child)." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Death’s but one more to-morrow." - Silas Weir Mitchell

"If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate." - Simone Weil

"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too." - Simone Weil

"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"It is my holy mission to be a sompnour or pardoner. I am the unworthy servant and delegate of him who holds the keys. A contrite heart and ten nobles to holy mother Church may stave off perdition; but he hath a pardon of the first degree, with a twenty-five livre benison, so that I doubt if he will so much as feel a twinge of purgatory." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Bad taste leads to crime." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"Music represented symbolically is regarded as more acceptable than music which happens in real time as sound. We have fallen under the sway of a strange inversion in which symbols are regarded as more real than the realities they represent. Music (or art, literature, science, technology) is often treated as a collection of works arranged in a historical timeline. The scores are regarded as having not only an independent existence, but a higher existence than a performance." - Stephan Nachmanovitch

"The outpourings of intuition consist of a continuous, rapid flow of choice, choice, choice, choice. When we improvise with the whole heart, riding this flow, the choices and images open into each other so rapidly that we have no time to get scared and retreat from what intuition is telling us." - Stephan Nachmanovitch

"I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me […]. Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered, throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in an occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held great secular power during much of Western history. When my folks held such sway, more briefly and in Old Testament times, we committed similar atrocities with the same rationales.)" - Stephan Jay Gould

"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are." - Stephan Jay Gould

"It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It's a crazy world out there. Be curious." - Stephen Hawking

"One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!" - Stephen Hawking

"So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" - Stephen Hawking

"In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour." - Stefan Zweig

"We can't forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I am content with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work." - Stefan Zweig

"And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea. “A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it.”" - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"But if he goes in the boat then the great light will go out. Untended it cannot live in the storm. And if it goes out—ah! if it goes out—ask of the angry waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night’s long toll of death must be without the light!" - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"Forbes Robertson I shall never forget: he owes me 50 cents. And as for Martin Harvey—I simply cannot call him Sir John, we are such dear old friends—he never comes to this town without at once calling in my services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt everybody knows that splendid play in which he appears, called “The Breed of the Treshams.”" - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"I wish you could have seen it—you who only see the drawing-room plays of to-day—the scene when the lighthouse man draws himself up, calm and resolute, and says: “My place is here. God’s will be done.” And you know that as he says it and turns quietly to his lamps again, the boat is drifting, at that very moment, to the rocks." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"The darkness has its own light." - Theodore Roethke

"Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"I am in this cause with my whole heart and soul. I believe that the Progressive movement is making life a little easier for all our people; a movement to try to take the burdens off the men and especially the women and children of this country. I am absorbed in the success of that movement." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of state and the nation toward property." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life. You are entitled to know whether a man seeking your suffrages is a man of clean and upright life, honorable in all of his dealings with his fellows, and fit by qualification and purpose to do well in the great office for which he is a candidate; but you are not entitled to know matters which lie purely between himself and his Maker. If it is proper or legitimate to oppose a man for being a Unitarian, as was John Quincy Adams, for instance, as is the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, at the present moment Chaplain of the Senate, and an American of whose life all good Americans are proud then it would be equally proper to support or oppose a man because of his views on justification by faith, or the method of administering the sacrament, or the gospel of salvation by works. If you once enter on such a career there is absolutely no limit at which you can legitimately stop." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal; and the first, and most elementary, kind of square deal is to give him in advance full information as to just what he can, and what he cannot, legally and properly do. It is absurd, and much worse than absurd, to treat the deliberate lawbreaker as on an exact par with the man eager to obey the law, whose only desire is to find out from some competent Governmental authority what the law is, and then to live up to it. Moreover, it is absurd to treat the size of a corporation as in itself a crime." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"When money comes in at the gate, sport flies out at the window." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"Yesterday's success belongs to yesterday." - Thomas Dewar, Lord Dewar, fully Thomas Robert "Tommy" Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar

"He who lies upon the ground he has nothing to fall. I spent a fortune on the powers of mischief, then nothing is left to be hurt more. (Loosely Translation: He sat on the ground lies Fall can fly farther. On me, Fortune has exhausted her Power of hurting, nothing remains That can threaten me anymore . )" - Thomas Kyd

"It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence." - Thomas Merton

"Though, if you ask her name, she says Elise, Being plain Elizabeth, e'en let it pass, And own that, if her aspirates take their ease, She ever makes a point, in washing glass, Handling the engine, turning taps for tots, And countering change, and scorning what men say, Of posing as a dove among the pots, Nor often gives her dignity away. Her head's a work of art, and, if her eyes Be tired and ignorant, she has a waist; Cheaply the Mode she shadows; and she tries From penny novels to amend her taste; And, having mopped the zinc for certain years, And faced the gas, she fades and disappears." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

"I think it was Darwin who said that a theory builder ought really to write to many of the men whom he quotes to see whether they still hold firmly to their published opinions, and whether they approve of the interpretations which he is placing upon their work." - Walter C. Alvarez, fully Walter Clement Alvarez

"’Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green, Grey headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white as snow, Till unto the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow. O what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town! Seated in companies, they sit with radiance all their own. The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands. Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song, Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among. Beneath them sit the agèd men, wise guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door." - William Blake

"‘O Dear Mother Outline! of wisdom most sage, What’s the first part of painting?’ She said: ‘Patronage.’ ‘And what is the second, to please and engage?’ She frowned like a fury, and said: ‘Patronage.’ ‘And what is the third? She put off old age, And smil’d like a siren, and said: ‘Patronage." - William Blake

"The Universal Family - Our Wars are wars of life, and wounds of love, With intellectual spears, and long wingèd arrows of thought. Mutual in one another’s love and wrath all renewing, We live as One Man: for, contracting our Infinite senses, We behold multitude; or, expanding, we behold as One, As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ. And He in us, and we in Him, Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of Life, Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other’s trespasses. He is the Good Shepherd, He is the Lord and Master; He is the Shepherd of Albion, He is all in all, In Eden, in the garden of God, and in heavenly Jerusalem. If we have offended, forgive us! take not vengeance against us! " - William Blake

"Seek love in the pity of others' woe, in the gentle relief of another's care, in the darkness of night and the winter's snow, in the naked and outcast, seek love there!" - William Blake

"We intend to take down that terror network." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen

"In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers anybody else to rail at me." - William Congreve