Great Throughts Treasury

"Meditation - If I am aware of the nature of my reactions, and movement of my reactions, naturally that awareness will result in freedom from the reaction. I cannot stop the reaction, because the reactions have been rooted in the sub-conscious, in the unconscious. I cannot prevent, I cannot renounce, I cannot check them. But if I am aware, simultaneously of the objective challenge, the subjective reactions and the causes of those reactions, then it results in freedom. Then the momentum of reaction will not carry me over with it, but I will be ahead of the reactions; I will not be a victim of my reaction, but I will see them as I see the objective challenge. That for me is meditation. All-inclusive attention while moving in life. Meditation does not involve any mental activity at all." - Vimala Thakar

"Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life." - Vimala Thakar

"We are related organically, and we have to live that relationship. To be attentive to the dynamics of the inner being is not creating a network of escapes to avoid responsibility. It is not continuing a false superiority that I am sensitive and you are not. It is simply recognizing that our personal relationships and collective relationships are miserable affairs, and that these relationships stimulate fear and anxieties and throw us on the defensive. However much we yearn for peace, emotionally we are not mature enough for peace, and our immaturity affects everything we do, every action we take, even the most worthy of actions." - Vimala Thakar

"The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves." - Virginia Satir

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"For love… has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"So, in a summer day waves collect, rises, the watershed, and fall, gather and fall, and the whole universe seems to say, you always say, that's all ever more pressing, and the heart the body which is lying in the sun on the shore she says. That's all. Do not fear, says heart. Do not fear, says the heart, entrusting her big sigh burden any obstacles for all sorrows, and resume, begin, gather, let them fall." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one color melting into another like the colors on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"So conscience for the sinner distorts the truth of the upright, but (his) soul is in agony at the judgment of the Chinvat Bridge, having strayed by his own deeds and tongue from the Path of Righteousness." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"Taking the first footstep with a good thought the second with a good word and the third with a good deed I entered Paradise." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"No day shall erase you from the memory of time" - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"How you spend your money is how you vote on what exists in the world" - Vicki Robin

"The human heart cannot contain only a limited amount of despair and then in expanded sea that passes over the sponge without adding to its water and single tear after wet and filled" - Victor Hugo

"Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology homeostasis, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"A man becomes a scholar by the help of self-study and proper analysis of whatever he has studied." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"One should always help the weak, the destitute and the impoverished." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"One should performed his deeds for the benefit of mankind with an unbiased approach because of bias gives birth to evil, which creates thousands of obstacles in our path." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"Anxiety is removed by faith in the Lord; the faith that tells you that whatever happens is for the best and that the Lord's will be done." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"By Your Grace, I obtained this human body; grant me the Blessed Vision of Your Darshan, O Sovereign Lord King." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Eat whatever one gets and appease the hunger; and sleep wherever one finds shelter. Do not store food for another day or build a house wherein to pass one's days. Escape the entangling coils of the senses and of the ego that prompts them." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"For the fool, the mind is a formidable dinosaur; for the intelligent, the mind is an angel." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"His honor is acknowledged, and he bears the True Insignia; the Lord Himself issues His Royal Command." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"If we are good to people then we are reciprocated in the same manner but if we are bad to them then we will most obviously be paid in the same coin." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"In order to accomplish his duties fearlessly, a man must take the refuge of 'Truth'." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"In peace and poise, they remain detached; in peace and poise, they laugh. In peace and poise, they remain silent; in peace and poise, they chant." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"It is considered a grave sin to die a debtor." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Keep the tongue under control; do not express all you are prompted to say; cut that inclination to the minimum." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"May our friends be dear to us. May those who hate us, end up in darkness of ignorance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Mutual affection only leads to co-operation and peace this propagates happiness and prosperity in the society." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The body is the temple of the Lord; the atmosphere of this temple is by its very nature filled with Love for all beings." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The body should be sound and healthy because only then we can have a healthy mind." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda