Great Throughts Treasury

"There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute – here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle."

"Happiness? It is an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed."

"The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle."

"Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached."

"It is an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to be needed."

"Happiness comes from the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed."

"Mere human beings can't afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty...If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises."

"Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself - except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence"

"Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present."

"Language is memory and metaphor."

"Hope is a talent like any other."

"For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received."

"She did not so much cook food as assassinate food."

"The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it"

"Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?"

"We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us."

"What goes on in the human heart is finally the most important thing."

"Writing is only my second nature... I would rather run around the world, looking at it, than write."