Great Throughts Treasury

"Many people seem to think that the spiritual life necessarily requires a definite and exacting plan of study. It does not. But it does require a definite plan of life; and courage in sticking to the plan, not for merely days or weeks, but for years." - Evelyn Underhill

"Those who complain that they make no progress in the life of prayer because they cannot meditate should examine, not their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for suffering and love. For there is a hard and costly element, a deep seriousness, a crucial choice, in all genuine religion." - Evelyn Underhill

"If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts." - Felix Adler

"The ethical element of religion has ever been its truly vital and quickening force. It is this which lends such majesty to the speeches of the Prophets, which gives such ineffable power and sweetness to the words of Jesus. Has this ethical element become less important in our age? Has the need of accentuating it become less imperative?" - Felix Adler

"There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded and restated. In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust, "though the heavens should fall." A merely borrowed belief is, at such time, like a rotten plank across a raging torrent. The moment we step upon it, it gives way beneath our feet." - Felix Adler

"Necessity and opportunity may make a coward valiant." - Italian Proverbs

"Out of a great evil often comes a great good." - Italian Proverbs

"The world wags on with three things: doing, undoing, and pretending." - Italian Proverbs

"Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"Human happiness depends mainly upon the improvement of small opportunities." - J. L. Balsford

"Each day before the end of eve she sought her lover, nor would him leave, until the stars were dimmed, and day came glimmering eastward silver-grey. Then trembling-veiled she would appear, and dance before him, half in fear; there flitting just before his feet she gently chid with laughter sweet: 'Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me! For fain thy dancing I would see!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien