Great Throughts Treasury

"The old thoughts never die. Immortal dreams outlive their dreamers and are our for aye; no thought once form’d and utter’d can expire." - Charles Mackay

"The Hebrew form of thought rebels against the very idea of a distinction between the secular and religious aspects of life." -

"Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Proverbs are in the world of thought what gold coin is in the world of business - great value in small compass, and equally current among all people. Sometimes the proverb may be false, the coin counterfeit, but in both cases the false proves the value of the true." - Daniel March

"If there be aught surpassing human deed or word or thought it is a mother’s love!" - Marchioness de Spadara

"O ye princes and rulers, how exceeding strong is wine! It causeth all men to err that drink it; it maketh the mind of the king and the beggar to be all one, of the bondsman and the freeman, of the poor man and of the rich; it turneth also every thought into jollity and mirth, so that a man remembereth neither sorrow nor debt; it changeth and elevateth the spirits and enliventh the heavy hearts of the miserable; it maketh a man forget his brethren, and draw his sword against his best friends." - Masonic Manual NULL

"Knowledge is acquired by study and observation, but wisdom cometh by opportunity of leisure; the ripest thought comes from the mind which is not always on the stretch, but fed, at times, by a wise passiveness." - William Matthews

"Waste not your strength trying to push shut doors which God is opening. Neither wear yourself out in keeping open doors which ought to be forever sealed. Some episode in your life, over which you are anxious, is closed. it is in the past. Whatever its memory, you cannot change it. But you can shut the door. Go into some silent place of thought. Test your self-respect. Ask your soul, "Have I emerged from this experience with honor, or if not, can honor be retrieved?" And if your soul answers, "Yes," close then the door to that Past; hang a garland over the portal if you will, but come away without tarrying. The east is aflame with the radiance of the morning, and before you stands many another door, held open by the hand of God." - Oscar Edward Maurer

"The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought." - François Mauriac

"We receive love - from our children as well as others - not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. And our capacity to love depends, in turn, upon our prior capacity to be persons in our own right. To love means, essentially, to give; and to give requires a maturity of self-feeling. Love is shown in the statement of Spinoza's... that truly loving God does not involve a demand for love in return. It is the attitude referred to by the artist Joseph Bender: "To produce art requires that the artist be able to love - that is to give without thought of being rewarded."" -

"In the end, thought rules the world. There are times when impulses and passions are more powerful, but they soon expend themselves; while mind, acting constantly, is ever ready to drive them back and work when their energy is exhausted." - James McCosh

"Art can rise above mere handicraft only by being devoted to the expression of a lofty thought." - Felix Mendelssohn, fully Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

"Thought alone is eternal." - Owen Meredith, pseudonym for Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

"Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down." - Thomas Merton

"Education is no longer thought of as a preparation for adult life, but as a continuing process of growth and development from birth until death." - Stephen Mitchell

"The experience of life nearly always works toward the confirmation of faith. It is the total significance of life that it reveals God to man; and life only can do this; neither thought, nor demonstration, nor miracle, but only life, weaving its threads of daily toil and trial and joy into a pattern on which, at last, is inscribed the name of "God."" - Theodore T. Munger

"Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages call inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation , in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed - I have never had any choice... Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity... The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Age and time are but timidities of thought." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"In every evil thought there is a spark of divinity, which has sunk to a very low degree, and begs to be elevated." - Joseph Opatoshu

"The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty." - Joseph Parker

"The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading. But a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep-freighted with truth and with beauty." - Theodore Parker

"Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

"All destiny begins with thinking. Responsibilities connected with the present duty. Duty of which leads to the balancing of the thought. One of the objects of life is to think without creating thoughts. That is without being attached to the object for which the thought is created and can be attained only when desire is self-controlled and directed by thinking. Until then, thoughts are created and are destiny." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

"Thinking leads man to knowledge. He may see and hear, and read and learn whatever he pleases, and as much as he pleases; he will never know anything of it, except that which he has thought over, that which by thinking he has made the property of his own mind. Is it then saying too much if I say that man, by thinking only, becomes truly man? Take away thought from man's life, and what remains?" - Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

"All things that can be known contain number; without this nothing could be thought or known." - Philolaus, aka Philolaus of Croton NULL

"Expression is the dress of thought." - Alexander Pope

"Beauty of form affects the mind, but then it must not be the mere shell that we admire, but the thought that this shell is only the beautiful case adjusted to the shape and value of a still more beautiful pearl within. The perfection of outward loveliness is the soul shining through its crystalline covering." - Jane Porter

"To tell the truth, however, family and poverty have done more to support me than I have to support them. They have compelled me to make exertions that I hardly thought myself capable of; and often when on the eve of despairing, they have forced me, like a coward in a corner, to fight like a hero, not for myself, but for my wife and little ones." - Philip Bennett Power

"In a crowd, on a journey, at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion." -

"We content ourselves to present to thinking minds the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged." - Chevalier Ramsay, formally Andrew Michael Ramsay

"Thought is the first faculty of man; to express it is one of his first desires; to spread it, his dearest privilege." - Abbé Raynal

"There is nothing more ridiculous than to imagine that any motion or modification of matter should produce thought." - Paul Reichmann

"If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception." - Paul Reichmann

"Words are the small change of thought." - Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard

"The thought is the myrrour of the man, wherein he may behold his beaute & his filth." - Earl Rivers, Richard Woodville (or Wydeville), 1st Earl Rivers

"This is the ministry and its work - not to drill heats and minds and consciences into right forms of thought and mental postures, but to guide to the living God who speaks." -

"There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so." -

"Thought engenders thought. Place one idea upon paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page. You cannot fathom your mind. It is a well of thought which has no bottom. The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful will it be. If you neglect to think yourself, and use other people's thoughts, giving them utterance only, you will never know what you are capable of. At first your ideas may come out in lumps, homely and shapeless; but no matter; time and perseverance will arrange and polish them. Learn to think, and you will learn to write; the more you think, the better you will express your ideas." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala

"The only thought in the world that is worth anything is free thought. To free thought we owe all past progress and all hope for the future. Since when has any one made it appear that shackled thought could get on better than that which is free? Brains are a great misfortune if one is never to use them." - Richard Savage

"As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Evolutionism, purporting to explain all and everything solely and exclusively by natural selection for adaption and survival, is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century. The inability of twentieth-century thought to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of the Western civilization." -

"The abdication of thought has been the decisive factor in the collapse of civilization." - Albert Schweitzer

"Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force." - Albert Schweitzer

"Thought wit be very useful, yet unless a wise man has the keeping of it, that knows when, where, and how to apply it, it is like wild-fire, that flies at rovers, runs hissing about, and blows up everything that comes in its way. Without any respect or discrimination." -

"Youth, when thought is speech and speech is truth." -

"No man is nobler born than another, unless he is born with better abilities and more amiable disposition. They who make such a parade with their family pictures, and pedigrees, are, properly speaking, rather to be called noted or notorious than noble persons. I thought it right to say this much, in order to repel the insolence of men who depend entirely upon chance and accidental circumstances for distinction, and not at all on public services and personal merit." -

"What difference does it make how many masters a man has? Slavery is only one, and yet the person who refuses to let the thought of it affect him is a free man no matter how great the swarm of masters around him." -

"I would be virtuous for my own sake, thought nobody were to know it; as I would be clean for my own sake, though nobody could see me." - Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

"Dreams are a secretion of our thoughts, and through them our thought is purified." -

"There is only work and love in life, thought Jacob. If we are fortunate, we love our work. If we are wise, we are willing to work at love." - Noah benShea