Great Throughts Treasury

"Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us… Evil had to manifest itself and fulfill its role, so that ultimately Good could prevail... Evil needs to manifest itself, for them to understand the value of Good." - Paulo Coelho

"Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we're not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly." - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

"This leads to a bigger underlying issue for all of us: How are we ever going to change anything? How is there going to be less aggression in the universe rather than more? We can then bring it down to a more personal level: how do I learn to communicate with somebody who is hurting me or someone who is hurting a lot of people? How do I speak to someone so that some change actually occurs? How do I communicate so that the space opens up and both of us begin to touch in to some kind of basic intelligence that we all share? In a potentially violent encounter, how do I communicate so that neither of us becomes increasingly furious and aggressive? How do I communicate to the heart so that a stuck situation can ventilate? How do I communicate so that things that seem frozen, unworkable, and eternally aggressive begin to soften up, and some kind of compassionate exchange begins to happen? " - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

"You can think of the groundlessness and openness of insecurity as a chance that we're given over and over to choose a fresh alternative. Things happen to us all the time that open up the space. This spaciousness, this wide–open, unbiased, unprejudiced space is inexpressible and fundamentally good and sound. It's like the sky… You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather." - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

"The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"There is more empty space in the book you're holding, than book. The electrons in the atoms of the book are moving so fast, they give the illusion of solid ink on solid paper. It's not. It's just an illusion. If all the electrons would stop moving for even an instant, the book would not just crumble into dust, it would disappear. " - Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams

"The first way is the way of the Fakir. It is a long, difficult and uncertain way. A fakir works on the physical body, on conquering physical pain… The second way is the way of the Monk. This way is shorter, more sure and definite. It requires certain conditions, but above all it requires faith, for if there is no faith a man cannot be a true monk… The third way is the way of the Yogi, the way of knowledge and consciousness .... When we speak of yogis we really take only Jnana-Yoga and Raja-Yoga. Jnana-Yoga is the yoga of knowledge, of a new way of thinking. It teaches to think in different categories, not in categories of space and time and of causality. And Raja-Yoga is work on being, on consciousness… Then in the Fourth Way the first principle is that man must not believe in anything; he must learn; so faith does not enter into the Fourth Way. One must not believe what one hears or what one is advised, one must find proofs for everything. If one is convinced that something is true, then one can believe it, but not before. " - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

"Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon." - Philip Caputo

"The difference between rising at five and seven o'clock in the morning, for the space of forty years, supposing a man to go to bed at the same hour at night, is nearly equivalent to ten additional years to a man's life." - Philip Doddridge

"Leave the poor some time for self-improvement. Let them not be forced to grind the bones out of their arms for bread, but have some space to think and feel like moral and immortal creatures." - Philip James Bailey

"Reality manifests itself as constant and objective – independent of us, but as changeable in space and time. Consequently, its reflection in us contains both properties. Mixed up in our mind, these properties are confused and we do not have a proper image of reality." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian

"Conclusion: What, then, is the importance of modern science for the argument for the existence of God based on the mutability of the cosmos? By means of exact and detailed research into the macrocosm and the microcosm, it has considerably broadened and deepened the empirical foundation on which this argument rests, and from which it concludes to the existence of an Ens a se, immutable by His very nature. It has, besides, followed the course and the direction of cosmic developments, and, just as it was able to get a glimpse of the term toward which these developments were inexorably leading, so also has it pointed to their beginning in time some five billion years ago. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, it has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the cosmos came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place in time. Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists! Although it is neither explicit nor complete, this is the reply we were awaiting from science, and which the present human generation is awaiting from it. It is a reply which bursts forth from nature and calm consideration of only one aspect of the universe; namely, its mutability. But this is already enough to make the entire human race, which is the peak and the rational expression of both the macrocosm and the microcosm, become conscious of its exalted Maker, realize that it belongs to Him in space and in time and then, falling on its knees before His sovereign majesty, begin to invoke His name: Rerum, Deus, tenax vigor,-Immotus in te permanens, -- Lucis diurnae tempora successibus determinans (Hymn for None). (A free English translation is: "O God, creation's secret force/Thyself unmoved, yet motion's source/Who from the morn till evening's ray/Through every change dost guide the day.") The knowledge of God as sole Creator, now shared by many modern scientists, is indeed, the extreme limit to which human reason can attain. Nevertheless, as you are well aware, it does not constitute the last frontier of truth. In harmonious cooperation, because all three are instruments of truth, like rays of the same sun, science, philosophy, and, with still greater reason, Revelation, contemplate the substance of this Creator whom science has met along its path unveil His outlines and point out His features. Revelation, above all, makes His presence, so to speak, immediate, vitalizing, and loving, like that presence of which either the simple faithful or the scientist is aware in his inner soul when he recites unhesitatingly the concise terms of the ancient Apostles' Creed: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." Today, after so many centuries which were centuries of civilization because they were centuries of religion, the need is not so much to reveal God for the first time as it is rather to recognize Him as a Father, reverence Him as a lawgiver, and fear Him as a Judge. If they would be saved, the nations must adore the Son, the loving Redeemer of mankind, and bow to the loving inspirations of the Spirit, the fruitful Sanctifier of souls. This persuasion, taking its remote inspiration from science, is crowned by Faith which, being ever more deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people, will truly be able to assure basic progress for the march of civilization. This is a vision of the whole, of the present as of the future, of matter as of the spirit, of time as of eternity, which, as it illuminates the mind, will spare to the men of today a long tempestuous night. It is that Faith which at this moment inspires Us to raise toward Him Whom we have just invoked as Vigor, Immotus, and Pater, a fervent prayer for all His children entrusted to Our care: Largire lumen vespere,-Quo vita nusquam decidat, (Hymn for None)-light for the life of time, light for the life of eternity." - Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL

"In almost every profession - whether it's law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business - people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all worse off for it." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"In my own country, many of the movies in recent years express our innate fears about what awaits us. They are apocalyptic visions that leave only a few people on earth—whole cities surviving under domes because we have depleted our natural resources. And often in these movies, for reasons that I question, we have space aliens who are always blowing up Washington, D.C., and the White House." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Remember that movie Independence Day, where invaders were coming from outer space and the whole world was united against the invasion? Why can't we be united on behalf of our planet? And that's what I want to do." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live." - Albert Einstein

"When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter." - Albert Einstein

"Growth is a pressing moral imperative for those whose needs are not being met, and industrialized countries have not yet found ways to maintain their standard of living, without continued economic growth. One hopeful strategy to deal with this dilemma involves massive improvements in the efficiency of economic activity so that growth in consumption of goods and services is "decoupled" from growth in the use of energy and material. In theory, this should permit an increase in consumption to be accompanied by a decrease in resource use. In fact, this "dematerialization" of economic goods and services must proceed faster than economic growth to produce the necessary reduction in humanity's total load on the ecosphere. The political attractiveness of this approach is self-evident - it enables the rich to maintain their high material standards while freeing up the ecological space needed for the poor to increase theirs." - William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel

"In alchemy it is stated that whenever we define the space from which we are responsible, everything is given within that space. It is as if the whole Universe comes down and sits at our feet... ready to be used for God's plan on Earth." - Reshad Feild, born Richard Timothy Feild

"He had his virtues. This old year was impartial. No discrimination knew he between classes or conditions. He meted the same number of hours to the man in the hovel and the man on the throne. The hour-glass be turned the same number of times for him whose garments were plain and coarse and him who wore garments of costliest fabric. Like God who sent him, this old year was no respecter of persons. He showed constant vigilance. No laggard, no loiterer, he. Having been sent to fill a space in time's calendar, he filled it to the full. Sent to mark off so many hours on time's dial, his hand was never slack; he slept not for a single swing of the pendulum. May we keep our vigils as faithfully! He fulfilled his mission. God's plans are deep, and we know little, perhaps, as the mission of any of these passing years, decades, centuries, and cycles; yet we know that each fulfills a purpose in the betterment of humanity; and the closing year has served well his embassy in bringing the race nearer its final goal. A prize, peerless and bright, awaits each of us if we are as true to our mission as the old year has been to his." - James Monroe Hubbert

"Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts. Feelings for whom? O you the transformation of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You heart-space grown out of us. The deepest space in us, which, rising above us, forces its way out,-- holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"O smile, going where? O upturned look: new, warm, receding surge of the heart--; alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic space we dissolve in taste of us? Do the angels reclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence, or sometimes, by accident, does a bit of us get mixed in? Are we blended in their features like the slight vagueness that complicates the looks of pregnant women? Unnoticed by them in their whirling back into themselves? (How could they notice?) " - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"That's my window. This minute So gently did I alight From sleep--was still floating in it. Where has my life its limit And where begins the night? I could fancy all things around me Were nothing but I as yet; Like a crystal's depth, profoundly Mute, translucent, unlit. I have space to spare inside me For the stars, too: so full of room Feels my heart; so lightly Would it let go of him, whom For all I know I have started To love, it may be to hold. Strange, as if never charted, Stares my fortune untold. Why is it I am bedded Beneath this infinitude, Fragrant like a meadow, Hither and thither moved, Calling out, yet fearing Someone might hear the cry, Destined to disappearing Within another I. " - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. [Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life .]" - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"It's a space where I'm loving and truthful and wise and compassionate and I'm not even trying." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert

"The nihilist makes one mistake: he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor. He has no consciousness of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible, is itself a product of history, is itself the outcome of all the renunciations of humanity that have been made over the centuries. Indeed, the history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually undo history itself. For clear awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing with a consciousness of the successive renunciations of the past, and thus too with the real desire to pick up the movement of transcendence everywhere in space and time where it has been prematurely interrupted." - Raoul Vaneigem

"I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room." - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury

"It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all." - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury

"Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West

"If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?" - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

"Jonathan Livingston Seagull is speaking to his young fledgling son who is learning to fly: You will begin to touch heaven . . . in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there. . . . To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived. . . . The trick is to stop seeing yourself as trapped inside a limited body that has a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick is to know that your true nature lives, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

"So much of what we said sounded crazy, yet none of it was false... as if two theoretical physicists stood on stage to say that when we travel near light-speed, we get younger than nontravellers; that a mile of space next to the sun is different than a mile of space next to the earth because the sun-mile space is curved more than the earth-mile. Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?" - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

"Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between." - Richard Carlson

"Along with Bach's music, Shakespeare's sonnets and the Apollo Space Programme, the Human Genome Project is one of those achievements of the human spirit that makes me proud to be human." - Richard Dawkins

"Justifying space exploration because we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good exercise for the violinists right arm." - Richard Dawkins

"It always bothers me that according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space and no matter how tiny a region of time ... I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed and the laws will turn out to be simple. ... But this speculation is of the same nature as those other people make - 'I like it', 'I don't like it' - and it is not good to be too prejudiced about these things." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil " - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"Upon identifying the reason for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and his demonstration using immersion in iced water to show that O-rings grow brittle when cold." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"Perspective is that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people. There are times when he may stand too close and the result is a blurred vision. Or he may stand too far away and the result is a neglect of important things." - Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright

"I once had a dispute with a group of Swedish professors at the University of Uppsala as to which country, Sweden or Canada, was the dullest in the world. It was a draw; they claimed superiority because of their long history, and I claimed it because of Canada's immense land mass, which gives us space for tremendous expansion, even of such things as dullness." - Robertson Davies

"Was driving through the countryside today with some people who insisted upon frequent recourse to a roadmap in order to discover, as they put it, Just where they were. Reflected that for my part I generally have a pretty shrewd idea of just where I am; I am enclosed in the somewhat vulnerable fortress which is my body, and from that uneasy stronghold I make such sorties as I deem advisable into the realm about me. These people seemed to think that whizzing through space in a car really altered the universe for them, but they were wrong; each one remained right in the centre of his private universe, which is the only field of knowledge of which he has any direct experience." - Robertson Davies

"So the space between two people diminishes; it grows less and less; no one to weep; they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the other's body, and beings unknown to us start out on a pilgrimage to their Savior, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door." - Robert Bly

"I will not now discuss the Controversie betwixt some of the Modem Atomists, and the Cartesians; the former of whom think, that betwixt the Earth and the Stars, and betwixt these themselves there are vast Tracts of Space that are empty, save where the beams of Light do pass through them; and the later of whom tell us, that the Intervals betwixt the Stars and Planets (among which the Earth may perhaps be reckon'd) are perfectly fill'd, but by a Matter far subtiler than our Air, which some call Celestial, and others " - Robert Boyle

"We'll always be happy with more convention space or plenary space, ... The city can always use it." - Robert Boyle

"We engage in an act of poetic meaning-making forewarned and forearmed. The warning is necessary: readers will have to roll up their sleeves and collaborate meaningfully with the poet to make the poem. Hence, the poet needs to play fair: leave the right margins unjustified and lots of white space around the piece. That signifies" Poem: Beware. Reader, if you are not willing to do your part, turn the page." Poems omit, hint, and sometimes -- as Plato remarked -- they may even lie. The reader has to accept that the writer is not exactly playing fair. But the reader has been fairly warned and should know what is expected and be willing to provide it, as the poet took special pains to provide something worth struggling with. The two thus form co-contractors, bound to work together to make the poem." - Robin Lakoff, fully Robin Tolmach Lakoff

"REASSURANCE: A TRIALOGUE - Cantor to God: "What profits it to see Thy people wallow, A prostrate lily whelmed in floods of water? She twitters like a caged and frightened swallow, When Thou art girt with weapons for her slaughter. Be over her, O Rock, a shield erected, And make Thy corner-stone of that rejected!" Congregation: "Before my foe I am humiliated, He sits in fatted ease while I must wander, Before his flouts and roars and blows prostrated, Yet I endure and fix my vision yonder, And wait for healing, with my crying stifled, Like Hannah’s, and a heart subdued and rifled." Cantor to Congregation: "What ails thee that soul-sick and bitter-hearted, Thou faintest, face and hands with teardrops streaming? Sow charity, and kindness shall be carted, Who trusts in force is ignorantly dreaming. Oppression passes, trampled by oppression, And violence breeds violent succession." Congregation to Cantor: "My years have gone in sorrow and in sighing, I hoped for respite but instead comes wailing, Before the balm arrives behold me dying." Cantor to Congregation: "Ah wait, faint heart, that sighest, sick and failing, Thyself against God’s mercy do not harden, Thou, eased of foes, shalt flower like a garden." Congregation to God: "Mine eyes are sick and faint from hope’s depression, Dumb like a sheep I bear Thy storm of fury, Perchance my pain shall cancel my transgression, Crush not the plagued and stricken son of Jewry, The broken-hearted, crouching ’neath Thy rod, He waits Thee, night and day, O jealous God. Gripped like a bird within its captor’s fingers, And crushed to dust, I groan beyond all bearing." God: "Hearken, afflicted one, for hope yet lingers, And look to Me, whose angel is preparing My path, for though at night be tears and sadness Yet in the morning come delight and gladness."" - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron