Great Throughts Treasury

"There was a time when I wanted to live in a south village, But not because I was guided by the auguries. I had heard that many simple men lived here— With them I would be glad to spend my mornings and evenings. For many years this was my desire, And now today I shall accomplish my task: So wretched a cottage need not be spacious, All I want is a bed and a mat. Often the neighbors will come to visit me, We shall argue vociferously about the ancient times, Rare writings we shall enjoy reading together, And we shall clear up all doubtful interpretations." - Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL

"Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them." - Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey

"What do I believe? In the private life... In holding up culture... In music, Shakespeare, old buildings... What do I enjoy? Music... Being in love... Children... Sleeping... Meat... My faults: Never on time... Lying, talking too much... Laziness... No volition for refusal..." - Susan Sontag

"Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future... Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity." - Willem de Kooning

"I cry, love! Love! Love! Happy, happy love! Free as the mountain wind!" - William Blake

"You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them." - William Blake

"My friend, judge not me, Thou seest I judge not thee; Betwixt the stirrop and the ground, Mercy I askt, mercy I found." - William Camden

"The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet." - William Cobbett

"Candid and generous and just. Boys care but little whom they trust. An error soon corrected -- for who but learns in riper years. That man, when smoothest he appears, is most to be suspected?" - William Cowper

"Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend." - William Cowper

"I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"I don’t care how poor and inefficient a little country is - they like to run their own business. I know men that would make my wife a better husband than I am but, darn it, I’m not going to give her to ’em." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I don't care how poor and inefficient a little country is; they like to run their own business. I know men that would make my wife a better husband than I am, but, darn it, I'm not going to give her to 'em." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I was raised predominantly a Methodist but I have traveled so much, mixed with so many people in all parts of the world, I don’t know just now what I am. I know I have never been a non believer. But I can honestly tell you that I don’t think that any one religion is the religion." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Republicans want a man that can lend dignity to the office. Democrats want a man that will lend some money." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"You’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"In my youth, I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order." - Will and Ariel Durant

"All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"To simplify is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without -- and yet preserve the spirit of the whole." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"One thread for the needle, one love for the heart. - Sudanese Proverb" -

"The [genuine] leader will face the painful task of loving people and at the same time of not becoming bound to them the usual way; to know their weaknesses and not to despise them or to fear them. He will, first of all, face loneliness, living in vast spaces alone with only a few friends. And even these friends may turn out to be a bother or nuisance, since all want salvation. Everyone wants something from him, anyhow. He will slowly realize with amazement how infinite are the desires to get things on the part of people. It does not matter what they want. It is the wanting and the getting that matters. And he will be well aware of the price paid to him for the getting: empty admiration." - Wilhelm Reich

"Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"People look at me in many ways. They've said, 'The guy has no regard for money.' That is not true. I have had regard for money. It depends on who's saying that. Some people worship money as something you've got to have piled up in a big pile somewhere. I've only thought about money in one way, and that is to do something with it. I don't think there's a thing I own that I will ever get the benefit of except through doing things with it. I don't even want the dividends from the stock in the studio, because the government's going to take it away. I'd rather have that in (the company) working..." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations." - Walter Bagehot

"Liberalism regards man as improvable but not perfectible." - Walter Lippmann

"You must not complicate your government beyond the capacity of its electorate to understand it." - Walter Lippmann

"We fancy that our afflictions are sent us directly from above; sometimes we think it in piety and contrition, but oftener in moroseness and discontent." - Walter Savage Landor

"Take me as an example. I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I'd been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can't run very fast. I'm not particularly strong. I'd probably end up as some wild animal's dinner." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as business, use the market's fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That's what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstones of investing." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"A little while, and the load shall drop at the pilgrim's feet, where the steep and thorny road doth merge in the golden street." - Washington Gladden

"The paternal hearth, that rallying place of the affections." - Washington Irving

"In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons. Or I would look out the windows. In winter, when the windows were closed, the church seemed to admit the light strictly on its own terms, as if uneasy about the frank sunshine of this benighted world. In summer, when the sashes were raised, I watched with a great, eager pleasure the town and the fields beyond, the clouds, the trees, the movements of the air—but then the sermons would seem more improbable. I have always loved a window, especially an open one." - Wendell Berry

"Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us." - Wendell Berry

"The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else." - Wendell Berry

"The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy (right opinion). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before." - Wendell Berry

"The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad." - Wendell Berry

"The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass." - Wendell Berry

"The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied." - Wendell Berry

"We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable." - Wendell Berry

"To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not how does he look, but what is his message?. . . The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty. . . ." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the Ring Nebula in Lyra. It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos." - Walker Percy

"The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver." - Walker Percy

"Even peasants wholly without knowledge of the quarters of the sky believe that oxen ought to face only in the direction of the sunrise." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

"Perhaps, to the uninformed, it may appear unaccountable that a man should be able to retain in his memory such a variety of learning; but the close alliance with each other, of the different branches of science, will explain the difficulty." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

"I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! ... But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hmm — what a devilishly difficult job!" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov