Great Throughts Treasury

"The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding." - Blaise Pascal

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing in it mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous." - Blaise Pascal

"As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same." - Charles Caleb Colton

"War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, not in the force of thought, moral principles, and love, and this may be found in the humblest conditions of life." - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

"He who merely knows right principles is not equal to him who loves them." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"A man can enlarge his principles; his principles do not enlarge a man." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"Music illustrates the primordial forces of nature, while li reflects the products of creation. Heaven represents the principle of eternal motion, while Earth represents the principle of remaining still, and these two principles of motion and rest permeate life between Heaven and Earth." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"[During dire days under the Nazis] Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he’s called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower

"The great difference between the real statesman and the pretender is, that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts on expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for immortality." - Edmund Burke

"Rely on principles; walk erect and free, not trusting to bulk of body, like a wrestler, for one should not be unconquerable in the sense that an ass is. Who then is unconquerable? He whom the inevitable cannot overcome." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved. As a rule the majority are wrong, the minority is usually right." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright

"The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of American is grounded in principles and not on any single personality." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR

"To lay aside all prejudice is to lay aside all principles. He who is destitute of principles is governed, theoretically and practically, by whims." - Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

"What experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"All truly great achievements in history resulted from the actualization of principles, not from the clever evaluation of political conditions." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

"While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

"We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"The doctrine that Universal Happiness is the ultimate standard must not be understood to imply that Universal Benevolence is the only right or always best motive of action... it is not necessary that the end which gives the criterion of rightness should always be the end at which we consciously aim; and if experience shows that the general happiness will be more satisfactorily attained if men frequently act from other motives than pure universal philanthropy, it is obvious that these other motives are reasonably to be preferred on Utilitarian principles." - Henry Sidgwick

"Many men do not allow their principles to take root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do the flowers they have planted, to see if they are growing." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"It is not what a man gets, but what a man is that he should think of. He should first think of his character and then of his condition. He that has character need have no fears about his condition. Character will draw after it condition. Circumstances obey principles." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages." - Henry Ward Beecher

"It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom." - Horace Greeley

"To establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offense and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes." - Howard Zinn

"Not only are moral laws with their principles essentially distinguished from every other kind of practical knowledge in which there is anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests wholly on its pure part. When applied to man, it does not borrow the least thing from the knowledge of man himself (anthropology), but gives laws a priori to him as a rational being. No doubt these laws require a judgment sharpened by experience, in order on the one hand to distinguish in what cases they are applicable, and on the other to procure for them access to the will of the man and effectual influence on conduct; since man is acted on by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a practical pure reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in his life." - Immanuel Kant

"The principal of ethics being a categorical imperative does not admit of proof, but it admits of a justification from principles of pure practical reason." - Immanuel Kant

"There are too many who reserve both the principles and the practice of the Apostles; they become all things to all men, not to serve others, but themselves; and they try all things only to hold fast that which is bad." - James Bryant Conant

"All reason is retrospect; it consists in the application of facts and principles previously known. This will show the very great importance of knowledge, especially that kind which is called experience." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster

"The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view." - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls

"The progressive principle is antagonistic to the sway of custom. The contest between these two principles, custom and progress, constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind." - John Stuart Mill

"The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated." - Joseph Campbell

"Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism - The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in. The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as Communists or Fascists by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what is used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed." - Margaret Chase Smith

"Ethics is putting principles into action. Consistently between what we say we value and what our actions say we value is a matter of integrity." - Michael S. Josephson

"Our capacity to reason and our freedom to choose make us morally autonomous and, therefore, answerable for whether we honor or degrade the ethical principles that give life meaning and purpose." - Michael S. Josephson

"Though the ethical challenges we face in the workplace may be different from those in our personal lives, the principles of ethical conduct that apply to those challenges do not change. There is no such thing as business ethics - there is only ethics." - Michael S. Josephson

"It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political station. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility. He sacrifices not only his own interest but that of his neighbor, and he betrays the interest of his country." - Noah Webster, fully Noah Webster, Jr.

"We really don't know what the fundamental principles of moral judgment actually are, but we have very good reason to believe that they're there." - Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky

"In my experience, very few politicians have solid principles that they are unwilling to sell out for the sake of winning elections. They are, most of them, "the hollow men, stuffed men" of whom T. S. Eliot wrote, and in Clinton we have perhaps as extreme an embodiment of this professional deformation as can be unearthed." - Norman B. Podhoretz

"To practice the basic principles of good health, visualize yourself as sound, healthy and filled with vitality and boundless life of your Creator. Look upon yourself as the unique individual that you are. Get in harmony with the creative, life-giving, health-maintaining forces of the universe. Affirm peace, wholeness, and good health - and they will be yours." - Norman Vincent Peale

"A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Circumstances should never alter principles." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

"It is personalities, not principles, that move the age." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

"Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without principles." - Plato NULL

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up in the vision of principles." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." - Ralph Waldo Emerson