Great Throughts Treasury

"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. " - Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman

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

"A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective. " - Edward Teller

"Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves. " - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

"There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange." - Elias Canetti

"Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying. " - Fran Lebowitz, fully Frances Ann "Fran" Lebowitz

"Doubt is the trouble of a soul left to itself, which wants to see what God hides from it, and out of self-love seeks impossible securities." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie. " - Franz Kafka

"At the center of the Universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision us to continue against all odds. Life is for service." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers

"The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary... and because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. " - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"Love does not inquire into the character of the recipient but it asks what he needs. It does not love him because he is such-and-such a person but because he is there. In all this it is quite the opposite of natural love: it "does not seek its own". It does not perform the characteristic natural impulse of love and life. Therefore it is basically independent of the conduct of the other person; it is not conditional but absolute. It wants nothing for itself but only for others. Therefore it is also not vulnerable. It never "reacts" but is always "spontaneous", emerging by its own strength -- rather, from the power of God. Love is the real God-likeness of man for which he has been created. In so far as love is in man he really resembles God and shows himself to be the child of God." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner

"Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire. " - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going." - Herman E. Daly

"Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage" - Herman E. Daly

"Stupidity has no friends, and wants none." - Horace Greeley

"How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort." - Ida Tarbell, fully Ida Minerva Tarbell

"Now, if in facing sorrow the mind has a motive, that is, if it wants to do something about sorrow, there can be no understanding of sorrow any more than there can be love if there is a motive for love. Do you understand? Most of us have a motive when we look at sorrow; we want to do something about it. " - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The man who is seeking comfort does not want truth; he only wants security, safety, a refuge in which he will not be disturbed. But a man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -- and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. " - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit, it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being." - Jacques Maritain

"An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy. A head has one use: For loving a true love. Feet: To chase after. Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind, for learning what men have done and tried to do. Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why. A lover is always accused of something. But when he finds his love, whatever was lost in the looking comes back completely changed. " - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable." - Jamake Highwater

"Leadership is leaders acting – as well as caring, inspiring and persuading others to act – for cetain shared goals that represent the values – the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations – of themselves and the people they represent. And the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders care about, visualize, and act on their own and their followers’ values and motivations." - James MacGregor Burns

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed. " - Jean Cocteau

"It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature. The application of science to the useful arts requires other abilities, other qualities, other tools than his; and therefore I say that the man of science who follows his studies into their practical application is false to his calling. The practical man stands ever ready to take up the work where the scientific man leaves it, and adapt it to the material wants and uses of daily life." - Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. " - Jeane Kirkpatrick

"Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors. " - Jim Morrison

"A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else. " - John Locke

"Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core." - John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles

"To be a leader, you have to make people want to follow you, and nobody wants to follow someone who doesn't know where he is going." - Joe Namath, fully Joseph William Namath, aka Willie Joe and Broadway Joe

"Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them." - Julien Green

"The world isn't purposeful. It isn't ruled by reason. The world wants to play. Fashion queens have always aroused more interest than future generations and their fate." - Kurt Tucholsky

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"He who does not know how to serve his fellow man, wants to rule him. Looks like what is going on right now. He also says we should always support the minority, even if that minority is 1. That the majority is often wrong, and we should then protect the one that majority "goes after." - Leonard E. Read

"Love will immediately enter into any mind that truly wants it." - A Course In Miracles, aka ACIM

"Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

"But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

"It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

"The more wants we have, the further we are from God, and the nearer we approach him, the better can we dispense with everything that is not Himself." - Madame Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon

"Everybody loves a fool, but nobody wants him for a son." - Malinké Proverbs

"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. " - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth." - Mark Van Doren

"Faith is wanting something with all your heart. Faith is taking a chance on something before you are sure how everything will work out. Almost anything can be accomplished by the person who really wants to succeed. But no woman will ever believe she can move a mountain unless she really wants that mountain to move. Apply this definition of faith to your dreams. " - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash

"I'm not a politician and not a policeman, just a mother who wants her baby daughter to grow up in a world where fear doesn't rule." - Mary Lou Retton

"God doesn’t want us because of what we have to offer him; he wants us because he has everything to offer us. God doesn’t want you because you have certain gifts to offer. He wants to give you gifts so that you then can offer them to other people." - Max Lucado

"God has invited us to participate in His work here on earth. Though He could do it without us, He has chosen not to. He wants our help. He longs for our participation." - Maxie D. Dunnam

"Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country." - Maximilien Robespierre, fully Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre