Great Throughts Treasury

"Doctor's don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit."

"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. . . One who doesn't try cannot fail and become wise."

"Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self."

"What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something."

"The best part of a good man stays... forever. Love is immortal and make all things immortal."

"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."

"A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography."

"A growing thing whose stages of growth always went unnoticed."

"11-year-old son of a great big man from perhaps Moush… informed me that his country, Armenia, was greater than my country, America. I asked, Why? He replied, Because I am here… this demonstration of high spirits, of confidence in the future, this pleasure in being alive and at home, informed me unmistakably that the future of … Armenia was assured."

"A man must pretend not to be a writer."

"A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler."

"A writer is always wanting to get the reality of faces and figures."

"All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too."

"A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values."

"All of the sudden, he said, I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for"

"A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead."

"All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy."

"All things lie dark in possibility."

"Aram, he said. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. I couldn't believe what I saw."

"Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student."

"Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another."

"Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow."

"Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?"

"Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art."

"Be the inferior of no man, nor of any be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart."

"Art is what is irresistible."

"Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it."

"Be, beget, begone."

"At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them."

"Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretense, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength."

"Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there."

"But the world was my home and I was glad to be in it."

"But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever."

"Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave."

"Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption."

"Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end… But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this - that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world - no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life."

"Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful."

"Don't forget that some things count more than other things."

"Despise evil and ungodliness but not men of ungodliness or evil."

"Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him."

"Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself."

"Every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?"

"Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world."

"Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else."

"Everybody has got to die but I've always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

"Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them."

"Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it."

"Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends."

"Everything is changed - for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War."

"Felt, known, and believed: … substance, energy, intelligence, man, motion, thought, impulse, and act."