Treasury of Thought

Dagobert D. Runes

• Publisher: Philosophical Library
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504012997
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume is truly and doubly a "Treasury." With its easy to read structure of brief entries in alphabetic order, it is a treasure house of observations on life and death, civilization and savagery, the universe and beyond—the Great Topics which have challenged man's thought, whether in passionate public debate or in the lonely stillness of his nights, ever since he first raised his eyes to the stars. At the same time, this is a "personal treasury" of the intimate thoughts of an outstanding modern philosopher on these Great Topics.

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CABBALAH: The secret book of Hebrew tradition had no single author, nor had Torah or Talmud. Its many authors wrote with sagacity which was not theirs but rather the reflection of the Divine Intellect they venerated.

——The Cabbalah teaches that in the realm of cognition and inner being there are ten different spheres. Not even all those who speak for truth see it on the same level.

CALMNESS: Let not the calm of indifference be mistaken for a mastered temper!

CANDOR: Some who wouldn’t suffer a breeze delight in sending forth a tempest.

Candor is insolence in a Sunday suit.

CAPITALISM: Has the rich and the poor; Communism, the poor and the poorer.

——I would rather take capitalism without a soul than Communism without a heart.

CARE: Who does not care has no care.

CATHEDRAL: The most imposing cathedrals are never too far from slums.

CAUSALITY: There are two causes of every effect; the visible one, and the real one.

CAUSE: It is a Cause that separates men from the mere mass.

CELIBACY: Is not a virtue and eunuchs are not paragons of ethics.

CEREMONY: Is the outward sign of an inward duty. Some who deride ceremonials are merely covering up the tracks of their own egotism.

CHABAD: To understand the forces of the world is not enough. To gain access to the creative powers, the Cabbalah teaches, one must have wisdom and intuition (chochma and bina). Only the three combined—chochma, bina, da-at (chabad)—raise man above the material world.

CHANCE: Throws people together, man and woman, friend and foe. Chance makes kin and kings, a turned-up nose or a dusky skin, and places one’s cradle in a mansion or a tent in the desert. From this unsorted mixture in the caldron of fate man draws his lot, his life and his luck. Yet some still like to think their dish was set out for them with deliberate intent by a providential hand.

CHANGE: Friends, work, leisure, convictions—man moves in a circle. Happy the man who can when need be jump his track for a wider orbit.

——You may change man’s conduct but not his conscience.

——No man is the same for more than a fortnight.

CHARACTER: Is hard to determine, there are so many layers of pretense and prejudice hiding the core. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the good are not so good, the bad not so bad.

——Character gets no better with age, only more pronounced.

——Character shows its color by our sins, not our virtues. The latter are too bland and lilylike.

——Suffering may not make character, but kindness will.

——Character must be seen in everyday life, not just in its Sunday best.

——Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you what you are.

——It is when a man is in power that he shows his true direction and the measure of his patience.

——Mankind suffers from those sick in character, not sick in mind. Our mental healers tend the foibles of elderly ladies and frustrated men.

What ails our generation are the viciously detached, despotic and clever schemers who are driving the world from brink to brink.

CHARITY: Is not the effect of faith, it is faith.

——Charity is the common denominator of all religions.

——There is no charity so noble the cynic cannot impugn its motivation.

CHASTITY: Is honorable but charity is virtue come alive.

CHEERFULNESS: May be only mood, but one for the better.

CHILDHOOD: The premature fruit may be much inferior to the slowly ripening.

CHILDREN: Emulate the prejudices and superstitions of their parents, rarely their wisdom.

——The newborn starts off with a score of notches on which to hang the good things in life. Watch the community load him with prejudice, malice and superstition.

——The wondrous adventures a child’s mind can experience on a walk through a deserted, littered lot set between two old houses!

——Our ancestors called their newborn boy Kaddish, the Holy One. The child was their link to living eternity. Those who spend their existence without a child have no share in the fate of tomorrow’s world. They circle around themselves with their backs to the future generations.

——To a child, its games of make-believe are as serious as our realities are to us. I sometimes wonder which of the two has more substance.

——There are no children, only young people.

——No one would undertake to raise horses without a solid study of husbandry; still people feel competent to raise children without bothering at all to properly prepare themselves.

CHIVALRY: The chivalry of the medieval ages was no more than arrogant horsemen riding roughshod over the poor of the land, the land of the innocent neighbor as well as that of the native sons. If these cavaliers went abroad with their artful weapons, hammered out of the poll taxes they took from the meager earnings of the serfs and laborers, they didn’t go to serve the cause of goodness or justice or peace, but rather the irrepressible wish of their liege or their own for loot of land or loot of gold.

——It may be that some of the epics and legendary tales involving the era of chivalry rate fair or even high as pieces of literature. But is the tune worthy of such a high price? Must truth and sheer humaneness be sacrificed as the price for these false, adulterated songs of romanticized glorification of kingly scoundrels and robber cavaliers?

CHOICE: At so many crossroads it’s not a choice between good and bad, but between evil and greater evil.

CHOSEN PEOPLE: The pagans and gentiles begrudge the Jews their claim to a heritage which they themselves have been rejecting for thousands of years.

——The Jews chose God when no one else wanted Him.

——The Lord is not selective; the people are.

CHRIST: The greatest number of books have been written about one whom we know the least: Jesus Christ.

——One cannot be a Christian while living the life of a pagan. If your heart is pagan and your deeds are pagan, you remain outside the Circle of Christ, which means Church of Christ, no matter what prayers your lips speak, nor what the ikon before which you kneel.

——The Jews always have denied and forever will oppose the concept of God besides God. God is Echod, and One stands eternally for no more and no less, no picture of Him, no son of Him. This philosophy unendingly separates Judaism from Christianity.

——If He came to earth today, He would never forgive us, in all His celestial beatitude, for the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated on His kin and the kin of His mother and His faithful believers. All the paternosters and all the hymns of all fifty thousand saints and all fifty thousand theologians and all the genuflecting of a billion Christian knees, those alive today and those interred since the night of the catacombs, could not wash away the Jewish blood that is on Christian hands. If Jesus came to earth today, He would shrink from the Gothic cathedrals and the forest of church spires that carry the cross He took upon Himself that man might live a loving creature. Perhaps He would slink away to some little ghetto street in New York City, where there is a tiny ten-by-ten synagogue. And He would sit down with the other bearded Jews on the hard benches of this true house of worship. And He would read with the others from the ancient book of Moses, which, as He said, He came to fulfill and not to destroy—the book of Moses, written in the script He could understand, written in the spirit in which He lived and for which He died.

——God lived with the world and its people for a million years before Jesus was born, so why begin time with the Son of God? Why not with God, the Father? There must have been good and evil before Christ came to earth; there must have been sin and repentance, devotion and derision, helpfulness and viciousness, manliness and gentleness and godliness; there must have been saints and thieves, lechers and ascetics, foul men and sound men, naïve men and critics, the Lord’s servants and the Devil’s henchmen.

——There was a God before Jesus.

——Millions have died for Him, but only a few lived for Him.

——Jesus may have risen, but His followers stayed down.

——It is the same family in Little Rock that genuflects to Christ in front of the altar and to Satan in front of the school-house.

——They suffer the cross He bore and go forth to impose His pains upon others.

——If His followers had been won by the point of a sentence instead of a sword, Europe’s history would have been less sanguinary.

——If the Jews killed Jesus, how come He is still alive? And if He is living—and certainly He is—why blame the Jews? Unless to discredit them as a whole.

——Those who believe in Christ cannot accept His assassination by Jews; those who assert He was killed a fugitive criminal do not believe Him Christ.

——To those ardent in adoration and yet intolerant: Let them ask themselves how ardent they would have been had they met Jesus in His living days as a poor preaching wandering carpenter.

They knew Him only in the glory of millennia, not in the drabness of the life of poverty and rejection. Before they condemn His contemporaries, let them question their own faith and belief.

——If Christ came back the second time, He would rise in Israel, where those of His kinfolk live whom the Christians failed to kill, and His tender voice would mouth the ancient Hebrew words of prayer and consolation.

If He were to come upon the high walls of the Vatican and meet the Latin priests in their black and red cloth and hear the forbidding tongue of Rome, He, the son of God, would shudder at the memory of the Roman angry cross. What the Roman Bishops had done to the people of Israel in His name, He could never forgive.

THE CHRIST DOGMA: The Vatican produced in the fourth century a grandiose drama, “the calumny against Jesus,” in which the Jew is the archvillain, condemned in the end to eternal punishment. So monstrously malevolent is the Jew depicted therein that the wide audience of the play finds it natural that all the Jews’ offspring are destined to eternal disgrace.

Such is the power of the play that it encouraged a hundred generations of believers to tread on the Jew like a serpent, garrot his children and burn his women and unarmed men as they never would a living hen or calf or goat.

Before the Christian world can redeem itself before God and man, it has to change this horrid play in which the Jew is the Devil incarnate.

The play is the thing, the script that opened the sluice of hate and acrimony in the great Christian Colosseum and made the infuriated audience yell for the blood of the Jew.

CHRISTIANITY: The first time a Christian child comes face to face with murder it is in the serene intimacy of religious teaching with the beloved, kindly, suffering face of the one murdered on a cruel cross. And the first time a Christian child comes face to face with a murderer, it’s the Jew, whose face ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y
• Z
• Copyright Page