Great Throughts Treasury

"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it." - Andrew Carnegie

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do." -

"There is no limit to the measure of sacrifice that one may make in order to realize oneness with all life, but certainly that ideal will set a limit to your wants. That is the antithesis of the position of modern civilization which says, "Increase your wants."" -

"How few are our real wants, and how easy it is to satisfy them. Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable." - Julius Charles Hare

"The man who really wants to do something finds a way; the other man finds an excuse." - E. C. McKenzie

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is he wants to live humbly for one." -

"If a man wants to succeed in his work he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the external world; if they do not correspond he will fail." -

"Poverty wants some things, luxury many, avarice all things." -

"Poverty wants some things, luxury many, avarice all things." - Abraham Cowley

"The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." - Adam Smith

"The unconscious wants the truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth." - Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich

"It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow." - Aesop NULL

"It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow." -

"It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow." -

"It is better to be a beggar than ignorant; for a beggar only wants money, but an ignorant person wants humanity." - Aristippus NULL

"If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, an time and energy limited." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Man must know what is his real, chief, and foremost object in life - what it is that he most wants in order to be happy…he must find out what, on the whole, his vocation really is - the part he has to play, his general relation to the world. If he maps out important work for himself on great lines, a glance at this miniature plan of his life will more than anything else stimulate, rouse, ennoble, and urge him on to action and keep him from false paths." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"A person who wants to lead the orchestra must be willing to face the music." - Author Unknown NULL

"When God wants to punish a man, He deprives him of faith." - Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." - Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman

"Augur said, " Give me neither poverty or riches"' and this will ever be the prayer of the wise. Our incomes should be like our shoes: if too small, they will gall and pinch us, but if too large, they will cause us to stumble and to trip. But wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much, but wants more." - Charles Caleb Colton

"We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore, never go abroad in search of your wants: for if they be real wants they will come in search of you. He that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much but wants more." - Charles Caleb Colton

"If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases." - Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat

"If you do not desire much, little will seem much to you, for small wants give poverty the power of wealth." - Democritus NULL

"‘Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both." - Edmund Burke

"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for, (including) the want of sufficient restraint upon their passions." - Edmund Burke

"The mind wants to believe that changing our circumstances will bring us peace. The mind thinks we’ve got to do something. But the reality is that we can relax in the circumstances as they are now, knowing that deep patience will bring deep peace and healing." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants." - Epicurus NULL

"The open mind never acts - when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still, when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our own conclusion. The man who wants to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate." - George Bernard Shaw

"When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity." - George Bernard Shaw

"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater." - George Bernard Shaw

"He is rich enough that wants nothing." - George Herbert

"Mind, it is our best work that He wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think He must prefer quality to quantity." - George MacDonald

"The United States was the creation of men who believed that each person has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he doesn't interfere with his neighbors' pursuit of happiness." -

"The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe." -

"My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worse. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it." - Hannah More

"Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor His infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants." - Hannah More

"Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them." - Henry Steele Commager

"Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual, the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life." - Henry Ward Beecher

"So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them." - Henry Ward Beecher

"It is hard to fight with anger; for what it wants it buys at the price of soul." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL

"If our Creator has so bountifully provided for our existence here, which is but momentary, and for our temporal wants, which will soon be forgotten, how much more must He have done for our enjoyment in the everlasting world!" - Hosea Ballou

"To secure one’s own happiness is a duty, at least indirectly; for discontent with one’s condition, under a pressure of many anxieties and amidst unsatisfied wants, might easily become a great temptation to transgression of duty." - Immanuel Kant

"Wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much but wants more." - James Bryant Conant

"In the creative process, we are called to co-create with the thing that wants birthing. We must listen, open ourselves, summon courage, commit ourselves to the task, and begin. And this is the hardest part: in the face of nothing, we must begin. Not waiting for the sentence to be fully formed before writing the first word. Not waiting for the completed image to manifest in our minds before approaching the canvas." - Jan Phillips

"Anti-Semitism, in a word, is fear of man's fate. The anti-Semite is the man who wants to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, devastating lightning: in short, anything but a man." - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Life is not always what one wants it to be, but to make the best of it as it is, is the only way of being happy." - Jennie Jerome Churchill

"The eye can only compare and estimate; the ear measures... Both the ear and the eye can evaluate, supplying us with intellectual, psychological, and emotional information of qualitative relevance. But only the ear can measure, thereby mediating quantitative and numerically precise information. If the eye wants to operate quantitatively it can at most estimate, but - as we all know - it is only able to provide approximations, and very often miscalculates. That is why the term 'optical illusion' exists in our language." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt

"An economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of fashioning wants in the future." - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls