Great Throughts Treasury

"O Lord, who shall requite Thy goodness? For Thou hast placed the soul in the body to vivify it, And to teach and show it the path of life And to deliver it from evil; Thou hast formed man from a pinch of clay and breathed into him a soul, And didst impart to him the spirit of wisdom Whereby man is divided from the beasts That he may ascend to a higher sphere. Thou hast him enclosed in Thy universe, And directest and beholdest his deeds from without, And all that would conceal him from Thee Thou beholdest from within and without." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"I can reveal to you that I wished to die - For with much weeping she left me Saying: "Sappho - what suffering is ours! For it is against my will that I leave you." In answer, I said: "Go, happily remembering me For you know what we shared and pursued - If not, I wish you to see again our [former joys]... The many braids of rose and violet you [wreathed] Around yourself at my side And the many garlands of flowers With which you adorned your soft neck: With royal oils from [fresh flowers] You anointed [ yourself ] And on soft beds fulfilled your longing [For me] " - Sappho NULL

"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation of our freedoms." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated. Since I was cut from the reed-bed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back. At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing. But it's not given us to see the soul. The reed flute is fire, not wind. Be that empty. Hear the love-fire tangled in the reed notes, as bewilderment melts into wine. The reed is a friend to all who want the fabric torn and drawn away. The reed is hurt and salve combining. Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song. A disastrous surrender, and a fine love, together." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off. That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"But there's a wisdom in women, of more than they have known, and thoughts go blowing through them, are wiser than their own." - Rupert Brooke

"There's a total and complete silence in that beautiful view and the realization, of course, that you're going 25,000 miles an hour." - Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart

"It is human to err, but it is devilish to remain willfully in error." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"If then we have angels, let us be sober, as though we were in the presence of tutors; for there is a demon present also." - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom

"The best pastimes for a true enjoyer of leisure who has to stay at home . . . reading by the fireside. . . . Listening to music." - Salvador de Madariaga, fully Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo

"When the Lord is known all fetters fall off; with the cessation of miseries, birth and death come to an end. From meditation on Him there arises, after the dissolution of the body, the third state, that of universal lordship. And lastly, the aspirant, transcending that state also, abides in the complete Bliss of Brahman." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of hought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like to the extent that is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills." - Simone Weil

"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Indeed, awakened people seem to function more effectively in everyday life because they act in harmony with what is, rather than in conflict or resistance. At the same time, they see the empty, dreamlike nature of reality—you could say that they awaken out of the illusion of substantiality into the reality of the empty, ungraspable nature of what is. The awakened person is in the world but not of it—or as Walt Whitman put it, in and out of the game." - Stephan Bodian

"I did speak extensively — often quite critically — about the reviled work of Richard Goldschmidt, particularly about aspects of his thought that might merit a rehearing. This material has often been confused with punctuated equlibrium by people who miss the crucial issue of scaling, and therefore regard all statements about rapidity at any level as necessarily unitary, and necessarily flowing from punctuated equilibrium. In fact, as the long treatment in Chapter 5 of this book should make clear, my interest in Goldschmidt resides in issues bearing little relationship with punctuated equilibrium, but invested instead in developmental questions that prompted my first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. The two subjects, after all, are quite separate, and rooted in different scales of rapidity — hopeful monsters in genuine saltation, and punctuated equilibrium in macroevolutionary puntuation (produced by ordinary allopatric speciation)." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually turned over to become the first vertebrates (for the classical statement of the inversion theory, see William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, 1920)." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled—while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Many times we serve God as languishingly as if we were afraid he should accept us, and pray as coldly as if we were unwilling he should hear us, and take away that lust by which we are governed, and which conscience forces us to pray against; as if we were afraid God should set up his own throne and government in our hearts. How fleeting are we in divine meditation, how sleepy in spiritual exercises! but in other exercises active. The soul doth not awaken itself, and excite those animal and vital spirits, which it will in bodily recreations and sports; much less the powers of the soul: whereby it is evident we prefer the latter before any service to God." - Stephen Charnock

"A high proportion of space scientists say their interest in science was sparked by watching the moon landings." - Stephen Hawking

"A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought." - Stephen Hawking

"The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty." - Stephen Hawking

"The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified." - Stephen Hawking

"And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science. For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold." - Stephen Wolfram

"‘Tis peace of mind, lad, we must find." - Theocritus NULL

"The indignity of it! - With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave." - Theodore Roethke

"I have often been charged with falsehood and hypocrisy, yet there lives not the man who would more gladly than I speak truthfully and lay bare his heart; but as I have not one idea, one feeling in common with the people who surround me, as the very first word I should speak truthfully would cause a general hue and cry, I have preferred to keep silent, or, if I do speak, to utter only stupid commonplaces which everyone has agreed to believe in." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"[The industrial age] a period of technological entrancement, an altered state of consciousness, a mental fixation that alone can explain how we came to ruin our air and water and soil and to severely damage our basic life systems. During this period the human mind has been placed in its narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our world of technological confinement." - Thomas Berry

"All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship." - Thomas Berry

"It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story." - Thomas Berry

"The environmental crisis can only be forestalled when there is a broad new cultural understanding of what it means to be human. Sources of this new understanding would be myth – New Story…… a spiritually based on an understanding of nature as the primary revelation of the divine" - Thomas Berry

"On Linden, when the sun was low, all bloodless lay the untrodden snow, and dark as winter was the flow of Iser, rolling rapidly." - Thomas Campbell

"But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible rights. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint. Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all." - Thomas Carlyle

"Are there so few inquietudes tacked to this momentary life of ours that we must need be loading ourselves with a thousand more?" - Thomas Jefferson

"In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them" - Thomas Jefferson

"It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law." - Thomas Jefferson

"I think the chief reason we have so little joy is that we take ourselves too seriously." - Thomas Merton

"It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances." - Thomas Reid

"Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear." - William Blake

"My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not." - Willem de Kooning

"Maybe ... I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know. I'm aware that some critics would take this to be an admission of latent homosexuality ... If I painted beautiful women, would that make me a non-homosexual? I like beautiful women. In the flesh -- even the models in magazines. Women irritate me sometimes. I painted that irritation in the Woman series. That's all." - Willem de Kooning

"The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves." - Willem de Kooning

"The pictures (I have) done since the 'Women', they’re emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it. I am not a pastoral character. I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like New York City. But I love to go out in a car.. ..I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways." - Willem de Kooning

"Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed." - William Blake

"The taxpayers paid for this. Right now they're getting no economic value from it. Zero." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen

"When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of algebra." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it, for a little while." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"In the strict formulation of the law of causality—if we know the present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg