Great Throughts Treasury

"The supposedly solid human body turns out to be an intricate interweaving of energy fields; where disease is not an entity but rather a fixated warp of energy fields; where the experience of Unconditional Love transcends the limitations of personal love; where mortality itself dies-and becomes immortality-and where I accept the Divine nature of all life forms, simultaneously physical and nonphysical, structured and non-structured, existing and not existing in any particular form at any given moment." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"The unconscious is composed of multiple, autonomous personalities. These personalities affect our state of health -- from allergic response to disease states such as diabetes and cancer. He suggests that the unconscious mind is far more extensive and powerful than is generally acknowledged, and that the normal conscious mind cannot hope to control the personalities within. Esoteric rites and initiations, he maintains, were designed to call forth particular personalities from the unconscious at appropriate stages of development." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"The rich earth, of its own self made rich, fertile of its own leaves and days and wars, of its brown wheat rapturous in the wind, the nature of its women in the air, the stern voices of its necessitous men, this chorus as of those that wanted to live." - Wallace Stevens

"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The revolution war, and this war is the only legitimate war in the world" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"This whole psychiatry is nothing else but a kind of microcosm of communism [...]. It would be better left to people their personal problems. For the question arises whether the problems are not the only thing in the world that people may have on the property?" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"It is your moral duty to be happy." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed." - Victor Hugo

"The heart does not calculate in numbers; it confers contentment which is immeasurable. That contentment can arise only through faith." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The sublime rejects mean, low, or trivial expressions; but it is equally an enemy to such as are turgid." - Hugh Blair

"We have deprived ourselves of that liberty of transposition in the arrangement of words which the ancient languages enjoyed." - Hugh Blair

"I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it" - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"Quoting an unnamed writer: To this day, she writes, I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do, I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or . . . to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter? . . . Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment." - William James

"New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses." - Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington

"Nothing yet proves that continued progress is inevitable, but that it is possible no one but an extreme skeptic or pessimist can doubt." - Edward Scribner Ames

"Human beings tend to discredit the things he cannot understand for some reason." - Elif Safak

"The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time." - Elif Safak

"So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are correct, but in only one respect - only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes- but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked that flat-out whoring but only very marginally." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor." - Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall

"The bulls are my best friends. I translated to Brett. You kill your friends? she asked. Always, he said in English, and laughed. So they don't kill me." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The very dawn of memory is sufficient to make us masters of the habit of our imagination. A single arbitrary sign is enough to enable a person to revive an idea by himself; this is vcertainly the first and smallest degree of memory, and of the command which we may acquire over the imagination." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose." - Eugen Herrigel

"If we look into the history of our own nation, we shall find that the beard flourished in the Saxon heptarchy, but was very much discouraged under the Norman line. It shot out, however, from time to time, in several reigns under different shapes. The last effort it made seems to have been in Queen MaryÂ’s days, as the curious reader may find, if he pleases to peruse the figures of Cardinal Pole and Bishop Gardiner; though, at the same time, I think it may be questioned, if zeal against popery has not induced our Protestant painters to extend the beards of these two persecutors beyond their natural dimensions, in order to make them appear the more terrible." - Eustace Budgell

"In the 1940s while serving as the executive officer of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives in Washington, D.C., I saw in a Hilton Hotel a placard depicting Uncle Sam, representing America, on his knees in humility and prayer. Beneath the placard was the inscription, "Not beaten there by the hammer and sickle, but freely, responsibly, confidently. . . We need fear nothing or no one save God." That picture has stayed in my memory ever since; America on her knees in recognition that all our blessings come from God! America on her knees out of a desire to serve the God of this land by keeping his commandments! America on her knees, not driven there in capitulation to some despotic government, but on her knees freely, willingly, gratefully! This is the sovereign remedy to all of our problems and the preservation of our liberties." - Ezra Taft Benson

"I have never made a threat. I've never made a threat, never expressed a threat, never - I've never - I would never threaten violence ever, because I am a man of peace, dedicated to peace." - Feisal Abdul Rauf