Great Throughts Treasury

"Idleness is the burial of a living man." - Jeremy Taylor

"Truth resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continuously threatened with burial by the shifting sand." - Albert Einstein

"Time magnifies everything after death; a man’s fame is increased as it passes from mouth to mouth after his burial." - Propertius, fully Sextus Propertius NULL

"It is the business of the statesman to provide a decent burial for the past and to facilitate the birth of the future." - Victor Wellesley, fully Sir Victor Alexander Augustus Henry Wellesley

"By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite." - Johann Gottlieb Fichte

"Love to faults is always blind; Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind. Deceit to secrecy confin’d, Lawful, cautious and refin’d; To anything but interest blind, And forges fetters for the mind." - William Blake

"I kept him for his humor's sake, for he would oft beguile my heart of thoughts that made it ache, and force me to a smile." - William Cowper

"From this hour I ordain myself loose of limits & imaginary lines, going where I list, my own master total and absolute, listening to others, considering well what they say, pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"On the Meaning of life: Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory, young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"In those days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one, who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the initial, evanescent, savage perfection." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"All this I see; and I see that the fashion wears out more apparel than the man. But art not thou thyself giddy with the fashion too, that thou hast shifted out of thy tale into telling me of the fashion? Much Ado About Nothing (Conrade at III, iii)" -

"In ultimate analysis, the universe can be nothing less than the progressive manifestation of God." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane