Great Throughts Treasury

"My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"I will not go so far as to say that the improvement of taste and of virtue is the same, or that they may always be expected to co-exist in an equal degree. More powerful correctives than taste can apply are necessary for reforming the corrupt propensities which too frequently prevail among mankind. Elegant speculations are sometimes found to float on the surface of the mind while bad passions possess the interior regions of the heart. At the same time, this cannot but be admitted, that the exercise of taste is, in its native tendency, moral and purifying." - Hugh Blair

"The only possibility of reform in Los Angeles, which is a 'see no, hear no evil' city, is if there is the glaring eye of outside investigators from Sacramento and from Washington D.C.," - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection–not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic - the supremacy of the organization over the individual - is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Alas! sir, In what have I offended you? What cause Hath my behaviour given to your displeasure? The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Queen Katharine at II, iv)" - William Shakespeare

"Alas, sir, how fell you besides your five wits? MALVOLIO: Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art. FESTE: But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a fool. Twelfth Night, Act iv, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"And as the butcher takes away the calf and binds the wretch and beats it when it strains, bearing it to the bloody slaughterhouse, even so remorseless have they borne him hence; and as the dam runs lowing up and down, looking the way her harmless young one went, and can do naught but wail her darling's loss, even so myself bewails good Gloucester's case with said unhelpful tears, and with dimmed eyes Look after him and cannot do him good, So mighty are his vowed enemies. His fortunes I will weep, and 'twixt each groan Say 'Who's a traitor? Gloucester he is none.' King Henry VI, Part II, Act iii" - William Shakespeare

"And now this pale swan in her watery nest begins the sad dirge of her certain ending." - William Shakespeare

"The Wright Brothers flew right through the smokescreen of impossibility. " - Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering

"What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they’re overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

"There is at present in the world a cold reserve that keeps man at a distance from man. There is an art in the practice of which individuals communicate forever, without anyone telling his neighbor what estimate he forms of his attainments and character, how they ought to be employed, and how to be improved. There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of conversation, without the disclosure either of our feelings or opinions. The friend of justice will have no object more deeply at heart than the annihilation of this duplicity. The man whose heart overflows with kindness for his species will habituate himself to consider, in each successive occasion of social intercourse, how that occasion may be most beneficently improved. Among the topics to which he will be anxious to awaken attention, politics will occupy a principal share." - William Godwin

"They held it their duty to live but for their country." - William Godwin

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use." - William James

"Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do." - William James

"We keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can." - William James

"What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?" - William Law

"A pattern is either right or wrong.... It is no stronger than its weakest point." - William Morris

"I too will go, remembering what I said to you, when any land, the first to which we came seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame, and all seemed won to you: but still I think, perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink, unless by some ill chance I first am slain. But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain." - William Morris

"Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name" - William Morris

"Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips, think but one thought of me up in the stars." - William Morris

"There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Casuistry is the department of ethics, the great object of which is to lay down rules or canons for directing how to act wherever there is any room for doubt or hesitation." - Dugald Stewart

"The consequence has been (in too many physical systems), to level the study of nature, in point of moral interest, with the investigations of the algebraist." - Dugald Stewart

"O, wither’d is the garland of the war! The soldier’s pole is fall'n; young boys and girls are level now with men; the odds is gone, and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon." -

"Or ere I could Give him that parting kiss which I had set Betwixt two charming words--comes in my father, And like the tyrannous breathing of the north Shakes all our buds from growing." -

"All history shows the power of blood over circumstances, as agriculture shows the power of the seeds over the soil." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Such war of white and red within her cheeks." -

"They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn." - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

"Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free - free in a desert." - Emil M. Cioran

"People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real. http://on.ted.com/BU00" - Erin McKean

"I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. IÂ’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobodyÂ’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless IÂ’m crazy or I keep getting better." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence is harder to accept than death." - Etel Adnan

"And yet it is not always in our power to revive the perceptions we have felt. On some occasions the most we can do is by recalling to mind their names, to recollect some of the circumstances atr tending them, and an abstract idea of perception; an idea which we are capable of framing every instant, because we never think without being conscious of some perception which it depends on ourselves, to render genera)." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"It is easy to distinguish two ideas absolutely simple; but in proportion as they become more complex, the difficulties increase. Then as our notions resemble each other in more respects, there is reason to fear lest we take many of them for one only, or at least that we do not distinguish them as much as we might. This frequently happens in. metaphysics and morals. The subject which we have actually in hand, is a very sensible proof of the difficulties that are to be surmounted. On these occasions we cannot be too cautious in pointing out even the minutest differences." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Our wants are all dependent upon one another, and the perceptions of them might be considered as a series of fundamental ideas, to which we. might reduce all those which make a part of our knowledge." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"When words were become the most natural signs of our ideas, the necessity of arranging them in an order so contrary to that which at present prevails, was no longer the fame. And yet they continued to do it, because the character of languages, having been framed from this necessity, did not permit any change. to be made in this custom; neither did they begin to draw near to our manner of conceiving, till after a long succession of idioms." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page." - Eudora Welty

"I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues." - Eugene Peterson

"I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly