Great Throughts Treasury

"Science affirms that ... Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk." - Simone Weil

"When you're young, you don't really know quite what you're aiming at. You're very impulsive and acting on impulse, which is very important and valuable. But you're kind of swimming in a blind sea. When you get older, you have more of a sense of direction." - Sinéad O’Connor, fully Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor

"What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"You cannot expect that a friend should be like the atmosphere, which confers all manner of benefits upon you, and without which indeed it would be impossible to live, but at the same time is never in your way." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously ." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Like many men who override the opinions of others, Challenger was exceedingly sensitive when anyone took a liberty with his own" - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Some men, in truth, live that they may eat, as the irrational creatures, “whose life is their belly, and nothing else.” But the Instructor enjoins us to eat that we may live. For neither is food our business, nor is pleasure our aim; but both are on account of our life here, which the Word is training up to immortality. Wherefore also there is discrimination to be employed in reference to food. And it is to be simple, truly plain, suiting precisely simple and artless children—as ministering to life, not to luxury. And the life to which it conduces consists of two things—health and strength; to which plainness of fare is most suitable, being conducive both to digestion and lightness of body, from which come growth, and health, and right strength, not strength that is wrong or dangerous and wretched, as is that of athletes produced by compulsory feeding. We must therefore reject different varieties, which engender various mischiefs, such as a depraved habit of body and disorders of the stomach, the taste being vitiated by an unhappy art—that of cookery, and the useless art of making pastry. For people dare to call by the name of food their dabbling in luxuries, which glides into mischievous pleasures. Antiphanes, the Delian physician, said that this variety of viands was the one cause of disease; there being people who dislike the truth, and through various absurd notions abjure moderation of diet, and put themselves to a world of trouble to procure dainties from beyond seas." - Clement of Alexandria, originally Titus Flavius Clemens NULL

"This visible appearance cheats death and the devil; for the wealth within, the beauty, is unseen by them. And they rave about the carcase, which they despise as weak, being blind to the wealth within; knowing not what a 'treasure in an earthen vessel' we bear, protected as it is by the power of God the Father…" - Clement of Alexandria, originally Titus Flavius Clemens NULL

"Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends [grasps] anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

"If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

"Some people living carelessly in the world have asked me: ‘We have wives and are beset with social cares, and how can we lead the solitary life?’ I replied to them: ‘Do all the good you can; do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not lie to anyone; do not be arrogant towards anyone; do not hate anyone; do not be absent from the divine services; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another man's domestic happiness, and be content with what your own wives can give you. If you behave in this way, you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.’" - John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites

"To admire the labors of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible." - John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites

"I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and security of the British constitution. You placed me in power eighteen months ago by the largest majority accorded to any party for many, many years. Have I done anything to forfeit that confidence? Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal to secure even justice between man and man?" - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"Delusion and wisdom don’t coexist very well." - Stephan Bodian

"Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers. The child we were and are learns by exploring and experimenting, insistently snooping into every little corner that is open to us—and into the forbidden corners too! But sooner or later our wings get clipped. The real world created by grown-ups comes to bear down upon growing children, molding them into progressively more predictable..." - Stephan Nachmanovitch

"Anti-essentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles." - Stephan Jay Gould

"God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business." - Stephan Jay Gould

"In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue)." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Our world is not an optimal place, fine-tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts… A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past." - Stephan Jay Gould

"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are." - Stephan Jay Gould

"When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience." - Stephan Jay Gould

"What a curious workmanship is that of the eye, which is in the body as the sun in the world; set in the head as in a watch-tower, having the softest nerves for receiving the greater multitude of spirits necessary for the act of vision! How is it provided with defence, by the variety of coats to secure and accommodate the little humor and part whereby the vision is made! Made of a round figure, and convex, as most commodious to receive the species of objects; shaded by the eyebrows and eyelids; secured by the eyelids, which are its ornament and safety, which refresh it when it is too much dried by heat, hinder too much light from insinuating itself into it to offend it, cleanse it from impurities, by their quick motion preserve it from any invasion, and by contraction confer to the more evident discerning of things. Both the eyes seated in the hollow of the bone for security, yet standing out, that things may be perceived more easily on both sides. And this little member can behold the earth, and in a moment view things as high as heaven." - Stephen Charnock

"But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance." - Stephen Mitchell

"The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite." - Stefan Zweig

"Now in my day—I mean when I was at the apogee of my reputation (I think that is the word—it may be apologee—I forget)—things were very different. What we wanted was action—striking, climatic, catastrophic action, in which things not only happened, but happened suddenly and all in a lump." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"In order to be happy oneself it is necessary to make at least one other person happy ... The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting." - Theodor Reik

"I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form." - Theodore Roethke

"I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass, the turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway, the paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,— All things innocent, hapless, forsaken." - Theodore Roethke

"If only I could nudge you from this sleep, my maimed darling, my skittery pigeon. Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover." - Theodore Roethke

"Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom." - Theodore Rubin, fully Theodore Isaac Rubin

"It is easier to exemplify values than teach them." - Theodore M. Hesburgh, fully Theodore Martin Hesburgh

"The unrest of this weary world is its unvoiced cry after God." - Theodore T. Munger

"Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Gentlemen: you have now reached the last point. If anyone of you doesn’t mean business let him say so now. An hour from now will be too late to back out. Once in, you’ve got to see it through. You’ve got to perform without flinching whatever duty is assigned you, regardless of the difficulty or the danger attending it. If it is garrison duty, you must attend to it. If it is meeting fever, you must be willing. If it is the closest kind of fighting, anxious for it. You must know how to ride, how to shoot, how to live in the open. Absolute obedience to every command is your first lesson. No matter what comes you mustn’t squeal. Think it over — all of you. If any man wishes to withdraw he will be gladly excused, for others are ready to take his place." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"We may think of peace as the absence of war, that if the great powers would reduce their weapons arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we will see our own minds - our own prejudices, fears, and ignorance." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The nobility of our lives, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role." - Thomas Berry

"We are presently extinguishing something like 10,000 species every single year. We only know 1,600,000 or so, but we feel sure that there are 5 million...We are doing enormous damage...And the important thing to realize, also, is that this is irreversible; neither heaven or Earth can bring back extinguished species, it's forever. It's the most absolute deed that humans can do, I think. You can never bring back a bird species. The Carolina Parakeet will never be back. The Passenger Pigeon, nobody will ever see again. And what we're doing is blocking out possibilities not only for our children, but for the children of 10,000 generation." - Thomas Berry

"All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been it is lying in as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men." - Thomas Carlyle

"Every new opinion at its starting is precisely a minority of one." - Thomas Carlyle

"Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will daily grow more and more right. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves." - Thomas Carlyle

"Speech is silvern, silence is golden." - Thomas Carlyle

"Tell us, ye men who are so jealous of right and of honor, who take sudden fire at every insult, and suffer the slightest imagination of another’s contempt, or another’s unfairness, to chase from your bosom every feeling of complacency; ye men whom every fancied affront puts in such a turbulence of emotion, and in whom every fancied infringement stirs up the quick and the resentful appetite for justice, how will you stand the rigorous application of that test by which the forgiven of God are ascertained, even that the spirit of forgiveness is in them, and by which it will be pronounced whether you are, indeed, the children of the Highest, and perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect?" - Thomas Chalmers

"The long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon." - Thomas Hardy

"Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this health a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair!" - Thomas Hardy

"Plays and romances sell as well as books of devotion, but with this difference,--more people read the former than buy them, and more buy the latter than read them." - Thomas Hughes

"I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past." - Thomas Jefferson