Great Throughts Treasury

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre."

"The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it."

"One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are."

"The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers. "

"Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language."

"Every one of us is a soul, and we're tethered to our ego, and some egos are larger than others."

"How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn't want or need anything from them."

"I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them."

"I want to be a good person, to have a strong will but not be inflexible; to court joy; to develop humor and loyalty and patience; to learn to say less when no words improve the situation."

"None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for a lifetime."

"If writing is your vocation, it keeps making more of you. But when you get to be an older writer, you enter a room where you want to use yourself up. You want to use up all your material, you want to amplify it, so that when you go there’s nothing left."

"The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning."

"Some things arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever."

"The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite."

"There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keeps moving, changing... They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing."

"Who wanted to creep along in comfort when there was one chance in a thousand of flying?"

"Yes, if you believed in words, if you lived by words, you had better be careful which words you say and how you say them. You had better be careful what you look up, which words, which names."

"You are educated when you have the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence."