Great Throughts Treasury

"It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck. An epidemic in indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great harm. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"No man who is not willing to bear arms and to fight for his rights can give a good reason why he should be entitled to the privilege of living in a free community." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care" - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Our country—this great republic—means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We live in a great and free country only because our forefathers were willing to wage war rather than accept the peace that spells destruction." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"You ask that Mr. Taft shall let the world know what his religious belief is. This is purely his own private concern; it is a matter between him and his Maker, a matter for his own conscience; and to require it to be made public under penalty of political discrimination is to negative the first principles of our Government, which guarantee complete religious liberty, and the right to each to act in religious affairs as his own conscience dictates. Mr. Taft never asked my advice in the matter, but if he had asked it, I should have emphatically advised him against thus stating publicly his religious belief. The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"To extract beauty from one's own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?" - Thomas Carlyle

"We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest, — has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world?" - Thomas Carlyle

"By this we may understand, there be two sorts of knowledge, whereof the one is nothing else but sense, or knowledge original (as I have said at the beginning of the second chapter), and remembrance of the same; the other is called science or knowledge of the truth of propositions, and how things are called, and is derived from understanding." - Thomas Hobbes

"The Future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions Past, to the actions that are Present." - Thomas Hobbes

"Whatsoever is the object of any man's Appetite or Desire; that is it which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate and Aversion, evil." - Thomas Hobbes

"Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education." - Thomas Hughes

"Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war." - Thomas Merton

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!" - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Just now I am trying to get ready for publication something on thermodynamics from the a priori point of view, or rather on 'statistical mechanics' . . . I do not know that I shall have anything particularly new in substance, but shall be contented if I can so choose my standpoint (as seems to me possible) as to get a simpler view of the subject." - Willard Gibbs, fully Josiah Willard Gibbs

"After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish me, me, me culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground." - Wes Jackson

"Happiness does not depend upon a full pocketbook, but upon a mind full of rich thoughts and a heart full of rich emotions." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"To be a friend a man should remember that we are human magnets: that like attracts like, and that what we give we get." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"Great is Youth--equally great is Old Age--great are Day and Night. Great is Wealth--great is Poverty--great is Expression-great is Silence." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"The quickest method for understanding and living your purpose, is to ask yourself if you're thinking in loving ways." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"My grandfather returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession." - Wendell Berry

"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry

"The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this renegacy, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unexampled vulgarization of the theories of Marxism." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Mental toughness is many things. It is humility because it behooves all of us to remember that simplicity is the sign of greatness and meekness is the sign of true strength. Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"Morally, the life of the organization must be of exemplary nature. This is one phase where the organization must not have criticism." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"The strength of the group is the strength of the leaders." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"One should never tire of insisting on the unity of the laws of nature; it reveals the unity of being." - Victor Hugo

"Indra is a sky god and a war god who holds the earth and the heavens apart, on occasion making the earth tremble." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"About thee (my husband) I have placed the overpowering (plant), upon thee placed the very overpowering one. May thy mind run after me as a calf after the cow, as water along its course." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Everybody should work hard to achieve success, growth and prosperity.But, this can be possible only when our health is good." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"I am a sacrifice to my True Guru. He shall not abandon me; He shall surely carry me across." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"May we 'lead' in the company of kings and amass wealth by our efforts." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Our Lord and Master is the source of pleasures and liberation; and yet, the fool forgets Him." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"If we take the opinion of experts of that field and follow his advises there are every chance of accomplishing that work easily and without much problem. Therefore we should follow such a path that leads to happiness and where there is no fear of going astray." - Yajur Veda, or Yajurveda

"Not getting depressed, frustrated or dejected is the basis for all prosperity and happiness. Giving up one’s life produces nothing good, to continue to live is the way to joy and happiness." - Valmiki NULL

"We are too inattentive or too much occupied with ourselves to understand each other. Whoever has seen masks at a ball dance amicably together, and hold hands without knowing each other, to part the moment after to see each other no more, nor to regret each other, can form some idea of society." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus