Great Throughts Treasury

"Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear in all my miseries; but thou hast forced me (out of thy honest truth) to play the woman. Henry VIII, Act iii, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare

"It is the property of truth to diffuse itself." - William Godwin

"Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity." - William Godwin

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." - William James

"O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim." - William James

"One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling." - William James

"We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another." - William Law

"One well-cultivated talent, deepened and enlarged, is worth 100 shallow faculties. The first law of success in this day, when so many things are clamoring for attention, is concentration-to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor to the left." - William Matthews

"It is with certain good qualities as with the senses; those who have them not can neither appreciate nor comprehend them in others." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"The height of ability in the least able consists in knowing how to submit to the good leadership of others." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"The struggle we undergo to remain faithful to one we love is little better than infidelity." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Youth changes its tastes by the warmth of its blood; age retains its tastes by habit." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"O brave new world, that has such people in it." - William Shakespeare

"O cunning enemy that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook: most dangerous Is that temptation that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue" - William Shakespeare

"O, men's vows are women's traitors! All good seeming, by thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought put on for villainy, not born where't grows, but worn a bait for ladies." - William Shakespeare

"Or any ill escaped, or good attained, let us remember still Heaven chalked the way that brought us thither." - William Shakespeare

"Now For self-culture nothing equals respect for others. To counteract firmness nothing equals compliance. Consequently it can be said that the Way of respect and acquiescence is woman's most important principle of conduct. So respect may be defined as nothing other than holding on to that which is permanent; and acquiescence nothing other than being liberal and generous. Those who are steadfast in devotion know that they should stay in their proper places; those who are liberal and generous esteem others, and honor and serve chem." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the people of Tibet will be scattered like ants across the world and the dharma will come to the land of the red man." - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Insight is within the grasp of the dreamer, for he escapes the waking intensity which tends to hold back the vitality that bids us carry on with life, often as underground levels. The eternal now instinctively carries us forward and contains within it knowledge and experience of the routes ahead, even though those routes are dimmed when we awaken to each day's new experiences. The prediction is clear in a dreaming world, but the route is clouded when we surface to live out the day's experience. The outer eye discerns only what is to be undertaken in a three-dimensional world." - Eileen Garrett

"SAMPSON: My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee. GREGORY: How! turn thy back and run? SAMPSON: Fear me not. Gregory: No, marry; I fear thee!" - William Shakespeare

"So bees with smoke and doves with noisome stench Are from their hives and houses driven away. They called us, for our fierceness, English dogs; Now, like to whelps, we crying run away." - William Shakespeare

"Some there be that shadow's kiss, and have but a shadow's bliss. There be fools alive, silver'd o'er, and so was this. Take what wife you will to bed, I will ever be your head: so be gone; you are sped. The Merchant of Venice (Arragon at II, ix)" - William Shakespeare

"Love renders all of our plans and all of our hopes a gamble" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser

"An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but an ignorance of aims make it impossible to be great at all." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"In the pleasant orchard closes, `God bless all our gains', say we; but `May God bless all our losses' better suits with our degree." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Very whitely still the lilies of our lives may reassure their blossoms from their roots, accessible alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer; growing straight out of man's reach, on the hill. God only, who made us rich, can make us poor." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"One need not be a chamber to be haunted; one need not be a house; the brain has corridors surpassing material place." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me,-- the simple news that Nature told, with tender majesty. Her message is committed to hands I cannot see; for love of her, sweet countrymen, judge tenderly of me!" - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"We journey to the day, and tell each other how we sang to keep the dark away." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Why not make the following experiment, which will not only be thrillingly interesting, but will certainly teach you more in one day than you could learn from books or lectures in many weeks. Here is what you have to do: For one whole day think, speak, and act exactly as you would if you were absolutely convinced of the truth of the statements that God has all power and infinite intelligence, and that His nature is infinite goodness and love. To think in this manner all day will be the most difficult thing, because it is so subtle. To speak in accordance with these truths will be easier, if you are vigilant. To act in accordance with them will be the easiest part, although it may require much in the way of moral courage." - Emmet Fox

"I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Memory deficiency got so bad with me, I forgot to repeat a piece of gossip I swore on my Grandmother's Grave never to divulge." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"A second way of crossing the line into clinical neurosis follows naturally from everything we have said. Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the "artiste-manque," as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project. The neurotic can't marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.17 In Rank's inspired conceptualization, the difference is put like this:" - Ernest Becker

"To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan

"The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me--and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting--into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school." - Eudora Welty

"There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness." - Eugene Peterson

"As the ate afternoon sun shone in Shaw's face and a soft flower-scented wind cooled him, his unhappiness turned to a detachment that was not at all unpleasant. He was utterly alone in the world. This knowledge thrilled him." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalising actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrel's delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naïve." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal