Great Throughts Treasury

"Religion directs man to God not as its object but as its end." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"To know God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, since God is man’s happiness. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him. This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"But the blessed Bishop of Geneva taught his nuns another kind of prayer, which even the sick can make: to remain peacefully in the presence of God, manifesting our needs to Him with no other mental effort, like a poor person who uncovers his sores and by this means is more effective in inciting passers-by to do him some good than if he wore himself out trying to convince them of his need." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"It seems to me that the best way will be the one that is most gentle and forbearing, which is more in conformity with the Spirit of Our Lord and more apt to win hearts." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"Nevertheless, when one is ill, one should be submissive to the doctor and obey him." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"Things arrange themselves with time. Only God can have everything to His liking; His servants should act as Our Lord did." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"What you are saying is true of those who want everything to give way to them, nothing to oppose them, everything to go their way, people to obey them without comment or delay and, in a manner of speaking, to be adored." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"You say you are not happy in the Mission. That, in itself, is not a sign that God does not want you there. Perfect contentment is never to be found, in whatever place and condition one may be. This life is full of annoyances and troubles both of mind and of body; it is a state of continual agitation, which snatches peace of mind from those who think they possess it and eludes those who seek it. Did Our Lord lead an easy life?" - Saint Vincent de Paul

"I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

"The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent." - Sam Levenson

"If the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them." - Samuel Adams

"It requires time to bring honest Men to think & determine alike even in important Matters. Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason." - Samuel Adams

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question." - Samuel Butler

"If you tie Handel’s hands by debarring him from the rendering of human emotion, and if you set Bach’s free by giving him no human emotion to render — if, in fact, you rob Handel of his opportunities and Bach of his difficulties — the two men can fight after a fashion, but Handel will even so come off victorious." - Samuel Butler

"In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance to you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities go on the precisely opposite system." - Samuel Butler

"Like feather bed betwixt a wall and heavy brunt of cannon ball." - Samuel Butler

"One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once." - Samuel Butler

"One who is proud of ancestry is like a turnip; there is nothing good of him but that which is underground" - Samuel Butler

"Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes... in comparison with past time... what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?" - Samuel Butler

"The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap, And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn From black to red began to turn." - Samuel Butler

"There is an eternal antagonism of interest between the individual and the world at large. The individual will not so much care how much he may suffer in this world provided he can live in men's good thoughts long after he has left it. The world at large does not so much care how much suffering the individual may either endure or cause in this life, provided he will take himself clean away out of men's thoughts, whether for good or ill, when he has left it." - Samuel Butler

"Bearing up against temptations and prevailing over them is the very thing wherein the whole life of religion consists. It is the trial which God puts upon us in this world, by which we are to make evidence of our love and obedience to him, and of our fitness to be made members of his kingdom." - Samuel Clarke

"The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying." - Samuel Goldwyn

"I believe that the trade unions will bring about both the improvement of conditions and the ultimate emancipation of workers. . . . I think that the emancipation of the working classes has to be achieved by the workers themselves. Trade unions are the pure, unadulterated organizations of the working classes." - Samuel Gompers

"I do not think American labor is engaged in a class struggle and I do not think American labor believes it is engaged in a class struggle, because in our country we have no such thing and I hope never will have. We are engaged in a struggle for common justice and for principles which are applicable to all alike." - Samuel Gompers

"My opinion is that we require no more Commissions, no more Sage investigators. What we want is action, and we want it immediately. We want a Department of Labor established, with a Secretary at its head, who shall have a seat in the President's cabinet, and that man to be a man who knows what Labor is, not only from a theoretical standpoint, but from the practical standpoint. . . . I hope you will do your utmost to see that such a Department is established, and let us get away from the puny vacillating system of unnecessary excuses by referring matters to irresponsible Commissions, from which no permanent and beneficial results ensue." - Samuel Gompers

"There are a number of people who mistakenly charge me with being a Democrat. I never was a member of the Democratic Party. I was at one time, in my early years, a member of the Republican Party, and cast my first vote for a Republican President--U. S. Grant as soon as I attained my majority. I never did belong to the Democratic Party. In the pursuit of the Nonpartisan policy of labor in which I thoroughly believe, I supported Republican or Democrat or publicist as in the varying parties I believed that they would best serve the people without regard to party. In the last twelve years and up to 1924 the Democratic Party, a large number of them represented these principles in advocacy of the peoples rights--that there were a larger number of them in Congress than Republicans--it was not because of partisanship that we supported a larger number of Democrats than Republicans but because, as I say, there was a larger number of Democrats favorably inclined toward the pressing interests and rights of the masses of the people." - Samuel Gompers

"When organized labor made its advent upon the field of industry it found the children in the mills and in the mines, in the shops and in the factories, and it is due to the much-abused organizations of labor that we find upon the statute books . . . the laws protecting the lives of the young and the innocent children, who through our efforts have been put into the school rooms and into the playgrounds rather than in the factories and the workshops." - Samuel Gompers

"I’d hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I’d call ‘idle rich’ – a group I’ve never had much use for." - Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton

"All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It is not possible to be regarded with tenderness, except by a few. That merit which gives greatness and renown diffuses its influence to a wide compass, but acts weakly on every single breast; it is placed at a distance from common spectators, and shines like one of the remote stars, of which the light reaches us, but not the heat." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Your levelers wish to level down as far as themselves. - But they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. - They would all have some people under them. - Why not then have some people above them?" - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"See that you buy the field where the Pearl is; sell all, and make a purchase of salvation. Think it not easy: for it is a steep ascent to eternal glory: many are lying dead by the way, slain with security." - Samuel Rutherford

"You will not be carried to Heaven lying at ease upon a feather bed." - Samuel Rutherford

"The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once." - Samuel Smiles

"It is quite likely that the modern contrivances for making Sunday-schools amusing have given them a distaste for the more solemn services of the sanctuary. If so, the amusement is a sin. The schools should feed the church. Children ought to be led by one into the other, exposed to the preaching of the gospel, taught the ways of God's house, and brought up under its influence, with all its hallowed and elevating influences." - Samuel I. Prime, fully Samuel Irenaeus Prime

"If the Greeks taught us how to reason and Christianity what to believe, it is Zen that teaches us to go beyond logic and not to tarry even when we come up against ‘the things which are not seen’. For the Zen point of view is to find an absolute point where no dualism in whatever form resides. Logic starts from the division of subject and object, and belief distinguishes between what is seen and what is not seen. The Western mode of thinking can never do away with this eternal dilemma, this or that, reason or faith, man and God, etc. With Zen all these are swept aside as something veiling our insight into the nature of life and reality. Zen leads us into a realm of Emptiness or Void where no conceptualism prevails." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything" - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"Every child is musical. Unfortunately this natural gift is squelched before it has time to develop. From my all life experience I remember being laughed at because my voice and the words I sang didn't please someone. My second grade teacher, Miss Stone would not let me sing with the rest of the class because she judged my voice as not musical and she said I threw the class off key. I believed her which led to the blockage of my appreciation of music and blocked my ability to write poetry. Fortunately at the age of 57 I had a significant emotional event which unblocked my ability to composed poetry which many people believe have lyrical qualities." - Sidney Madwed

"Thinking and Thought: Thoughts are funny little things, They can make paupers or make kings." - Sidney Madwed

"Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage." - Sydney J. Harris

"The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war." - Sydney J. Harris

"In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The EGO, or territorial-status circuit of the primate brain is a social creation for which one person at a time gets the blame." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud