Great Throughts Treasury

"Then there was the concert where the boys refused to sing 'God Save the King' because of the pudding they had had for luncheon. One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"An ideal is a port toward which we resolve to steer. We may not reach it. The mere fact that our goal is definitely located does not suffice to conduct us thither. But surely we shall thus stand a better chance of making port in the end than if we drift about aimlessly, the sport of winds and tides, without having decided in our own minds in what direction we ought to bend our course. The moral law is the expression of our inmost nature, and when we live in consonance with it we feel that we are living out our true being." - Felix Adler

"The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame." - Gustave Flaubert

"Very seldom does any good thing arise but there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it." - Italian Proverbs

"When house and land are gone and spent, then learning is most excellent." - Italian Proverbs

"An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"A new day will come and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien