Great Throughts Treasury

"Our Lord is pleased to deprive us of temporal goods; may it please His Divine Goodness to give us spiritual ones!" - Saint Vincent de Paul

"Man, unlike the animal, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it." - Samuel Butler

"There can be no doubt about faith and not reason being the ultimate ratio. Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has no demonstrable first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which transcend demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure indeed is demonstration, but his ground his faith. Nor again can he get further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists in differing from him. He says which is absurd, and declines to discuss the matter further. Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be as necessary for him as for anyone else." - Samuel Butler

"If, in all this civilization, and if, in all the wealth produced, if in all this great fertile country of ours . . . we assert first, that wherever and whenever there be one human soul in our country walking the streets unable to find the opportunity to perform work and service to society, to demand in return for it the decent livelihood with opportunities for the cultivation of the best that is in us, if there is that opportunity denied to any one single man or woman in all this country, to him or to her all our boasted civilization is a sham." - Samuel Gompers

"The man who loves war is an enemy to the human race." - Samuel Gompers

"The wages of women in manufactures are often less in proportion than the amount appropriated by the state for the support of convicts in the penitentiary." - Samuel Gompers

"We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and bright. These in brief are the primary demands made by the Trade Unions in the name of labor. These are the demands made by labor upon modern society and in their consideration is involved the fate of civilization." - Samuel Gompers

"Some men relate what they think, as what they know; some men of confused memories, and habitual inaccuracy, ascribe to one man what belongs to another; and some talk on without thought or care. A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The person who is not disturbed by happiness or distress and steady in both is certainly eligible for liberation." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL

"A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive." - Sydney J. Harris

"People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault." - Sydney J. Harris

"The most important tactic in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face." - Sydney J. Harris

"A minute later the bailiff and four of his men rode past him on their journey back to Southampton, the other two having been chosen as grave-diggers. As they passed Alleyne saw that one of the men was wiping his sword-blade upon the mane of his horse. A deadly sickness came over him at the sight, and sitting down by the wayside he burst out weeping, with his nerves all in a jangle. It was a terrible world thought he, and it was hard to know which were the most to be dreaded, the knaves or the men of the law." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Sin is the transgression of the divine law and disobedience of the heavenly precepts." - Ambrose, aka Saint Ambrose, fully Aurelius Ambrosius NULL

"Because nothing is true except by participating in truth; and so, the truth of something true is in that true thing. But the thing stated is not in the true statement, and thus must not be called its truth; rather, it must be called the cause of the statement's truth. Therefore, it seems to me that the truth of the statement must be sought only in the statement itself.." - Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL

"How beautiful is our vocation! It is for us, it is for us, it is for Carmel to preserve "the salt of the earth" We offer our prayers and sacrifices for the apostles of the Lord; we ought ourselves to be their apostles while by word and example they preach the Gospel to our brethren." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"Prayer is, for me, an outburst from the heart; it is a simple glance darted upwards to Heaven; it is a cry of gratitude and of love in the midst of trial as in the midst of joy! In a word, it is something exalted, supernatural, which dilates the soul and unites it to God. Sometimes when I find myself, spiritually, in dryness so great that I cannot produce a single good thought, I recite very slowly a Pater or an Ave Maria; these prayers alone console me, they suffice, they nourish my soul." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"A woman who pretends to laugh at love is like a child who sings at night when he is afraid" - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages." - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"History doth not reckon twenty professed atheists in all ages in the compass of the whole world: and we have not the name of any one absolute atheist upon record in Scripture: yet it is questioned, whether any of them, noted in history with that infamous name, were downright deniers of the existence of God, but rather because they disparaged the deities commonly worshipped by the nations where they lived, as being of a clearer reason to discern that those qualities, vulgarly attributed to their gods, as lust and luxury, wantonness and quarrels, were unworthy of the nature of a god." - Stephen Charnock

"Natural men desire to know God and some part of his will and law, not out of a sense of their practical excellency, but a natural thirst after knowledge: and if they have a delight, it is in the act of knowing, not in the object known, not in the duties that stream from that knowledge; they design the furnishing their understandings, not the quickening their affections,—like idle boys that strike fire, not to warm themselves by the heat, but sport themselves with sparks; whereas a gracious soul accounts not only his meditation, or the operations of his soul about God and His will, to be sweet, but he hath a joy in the object of that meditation. Many have the knowledge of God, who have no delight in him or his will." - Stephen Charnock

"Terrified consciences, that are Magor-missabib, see nothing but matter of fear round about. As they have lived without the bounds of the law, they are afraid to fall under the stroke of his justice: fear wishes the destruction of that which it apprehends hurtful: it considers him as a God to whom vengeance belongs, as the Judge of all the earth. The less hopes such an one hath of his pardon, the more joy he would have to hear that his judge should he stripped of his life: he would entertain with delight any reasons that might support him in the conceit that there were no God: in his present state such a doctrine would be his security from an account: he would as much rejoice if there were no God to inflame an hell for him, as any guilty malefactor would if there were no judge to order a gibbet for him." - Stephen Charnock

"Works make not the heart good, but a good heart makes the works good." - Stephen Charnock

"Wishes are like magnifying glasses they enlarge and focus an intention that is already inside us." - Stephen Mitchell

"In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"He had sought to be as retiring and cautious as possible. For - after that and while connected with the club, he had been taken with the fancy of trying to live up to the ideals with which the seemingly stern face of that institution had inspired him - conservatism - hard work - saving one’s money - looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions — none more so than the most capable." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"The mind enters itself, and God the mind, and one is One, free in the tearing wind." - Theodore Roethke

"Quality - in its classic Greek sense - how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy." - Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White

"The bosses of the Democratic party and the bosses of the Republican party alike have a closer grip than ever before on the party machines in the States and in the Nation. This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal; and the first, and most elementary, kind of square deal is to give him in advance full information as to just what he can, and what he cannot, legally and properly do. It is absurd, and much worse than absurd, to treat the deliberate lawbreaker as on an exact par with the man eager to obey the law, whose only desire is to find out from some competent Governmental authority what the law is, and then to live up to it. Moreover, it is absurd to treat the size of a corporation as in itself a crime." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius." - Thomas Carlyle

"Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, that love of yours was mine, my Dear! That love of yours was mine." - Thomas Carlyle

"We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true" - Thomas Carlyle

"Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband." - Thomas Hardy

"It may be remarked for the comfort of honest poverty that avarice reigns most in those who have but few good qualities to recommend them. This is a weed that will grow in a barren soil." - Thomas Hughes

"To be read by bare inscriptions, like many in Gruter,--to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets or first letters of our names--to be studied by antiquarians who we were, and have new names given us like many of the mummies, are cold consolation unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages." - Thomas Hughes

"Having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions." - Thomas Jefferson

"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." - Thomas Jefferson

"Each one of us works out his own destiny in inseparable union with all those others with whom God has willed us to live. We share with one another the creative work of living in the world. And it is through our struggle with material reality, with nature, that we help one another create at the same time our own destiny and a new world for our descendants." - Thomas Merton

"For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion." - Thomas Merton

"If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return, then there can be no truth between us." - Thomas Merton

"If we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that viewing things from a basically different perspective—that of our adversary—we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically." - Thomas Merton

"One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drains every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed." - Thomas Merton

"The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility." - Thomas Merton

"The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life." - Thomas Merton

"Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that's nothing to worry about." - Thomas Nagel

"A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing." - Thomas Nashe

"But the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any." - Thomas Paine