Great Throughts Treasury

"The disposition to give a cup of cold water to a disciple, is a far nobler property than the finest intellect." - William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters

"Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely." - William James

"O polish'd perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night! sleep with it now! Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet As he whose brow with homely biggen bound Snores out the watch of night." - William Shakespeare

"My Lord Anson, at the Admiralty, sends word to Chatham, then confined to his chamber by one of his most violent attacks of the gout, that it is impossible for him to fit out a naval expedition within the period to which he is limited. "Impossible!" cried Chatham, glaring at the messenger; "who talks to me of impossibilities?" Then starting to his feet, and forcing out great drops of agony on his brow with the excruciating torment of the effort, he exclaimed, "Tell Lord Anson that he serves under a minister who treads on impossibilities!"" - Edwin Percy Whipple

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism." - Albert Einstein

"Shall remain! Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you His absolute 'shall'? Coriolanus (Coriolanus at III, i)" - William Shakespeare

"The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is" - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"The variety of all things forms a pleasure." - Euripedes NULL

"When the danger is past God is cheated." - Italian Proverbs