Great Throughts Treasury

"Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never."

"Friendship is love minus sex and plus reason. Love is friendship plus sex and minus reason."

"General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others."

"Good parties create a temporary youthfulness."

"Fulfillment is often more trouble than it is worth."

"Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise."

"Great talkers are trying to fill the gap between themselves and others, but only widen it."

"Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage."

"Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little."

"Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism."

"I cling to depression, thinking it a form of truth."

"I am skeptical in principle, gullible in practice."

"I am easy-going right up to the borders of my self-interest."

"I keep renaming my motives, but continue doing the same things"

"I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am."

"I have learned to keep to myself how exceptional I am."

"I did not know I was in my prime until afterwards."

"I keep eating for fear I will be hungry."

"I love you is the inscription on Pandora's box."

"I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy."

"I see what you mean, but I do not think what you think."

"Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own."

"I tried good taste, but the strain was too much for me."

"If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined."

"If I can't serve as a role model, let me serve as a warning."

"If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism."

"Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit."

"If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether."

"If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire."

"If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist?s office would be full of luminous ideas."

"If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation."

"If we think about the obvious long enough, it dissolves."

"If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements."

"Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are."

"I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly."

"If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting."

"In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be."

"In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything"

"In every death, a busy world comes to an end."

"In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners."

"In bridge clubs and in councils of state, the passions are the same."

"In the street, the gaze of desire is furtive or menacing."

"Innocence: I am only stepping on your face because it lies in my path."

"Innovation violates tradition - attacks it in public and steals from it in private."

"Inconsistency has been overpraised by people who do not expect to suffer from it."

"Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation."

"Intelligence complicates; wisdom simplifies."

"Intuition is often mistaken, but not altogether"

"Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge."

"It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting."