Great Throughts Treasury

"To know all is to forgive all. No commonplace is more untrue. Behavior, whether conditioned by an individual neurosis or by society, can be understood, that is to say, one knows exactly why such and such an individual behaves as he does. But a personal action or deed is always mysterious. When we really act, precisely because it is a matter of free choice, we can never say exactly why we do this rather than that. But it is only deeds that we are required to forgive. If someone does me an injury, the question of forgiveness only arises if I am convinced (a) that the injury he did me was a free act on his part and therefore no less mysterious to him than to me, and (b) that it was me personally whom he meant to injure. He knows as well as they do why they are doing this -- they are a squad, detailed to execute a criminal. They do not know what they are doing, because it is not their business, as executioners, to know whom they are crucifying. If the person who does me an injury does not know what he is doing, then it is as ridiculous for me to talk about forgiving him as it would be for me to forgive a tile which falls on my head in a gale." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh." - Walker Percy

"To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy

"And what have I to give my friends in the last resort? An awkwardness, a shyness, and a scrap." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"Social-Democracy, however, wants, on the contrary, to develop the class struggle of the proletariat to the point where the latter will take the leading part in the popular Russian revolution, i.e., will lead this revolution to a the democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his knee-guards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two lying full length where he fell, his goal still intact." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Virtuous men alone possess friends." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"We must go to the roots of the problem, to the core of the human psyche, recognizing that collective social action begins with action in individual life. We cannot separate the individual and the society. We each contain the society when we accept the value structure of society, when we accept the priorities worked out for us by governments and the states and the political parties. We are expressions of the collective, repeating the pattern created for us, and we feel happy because we are given physical security, economic security, comfort, leisure, entertainment. We have been trained to be obsessed with the idea of security; the idea of tomorrow haunts us much more than the responsibility for today." - Vimala Thakar

"I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink..." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I praise good thoughts, good words, and good deeds and those that are to be thought, spoken, and done. I do accept all good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. I do renounce all evil thoughts, evil words, and evil deeds." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"God is behind any and all efforts that a human being makes toward him." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"When we associate with others we really associate with ourselves. We like or dislike in others whatever we like or dislike in ourselves." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Every choice has a time cost as well, leaving us famished for time. And we need time to think, dream, love, grieve, care, grow, tend – everything involved in making the human world more humane. It seems impossible to the American mind that limiting individualism, speed and choice could liberate us, but I concluded in those months of cancer-induced stillness that this is precisely what we need. We are like hyper kids exhausting ourselves, unable to stop and longing for a grown-up to tell us to settle down, wash our hands, eat dinner and go to bed. We need to rest . In AA they have a saying, “HALT: Don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired.” Hyper-everything drove us into our consumer addiction. Sobriety is slowing down." - Vicki Robin

"How is it, then, that we have collectively bamboozled ourselves into believing in material limitlessness? That we could grow our businesses without reference to their field of play – the resources of the earth? That our possessions could grow without reference to the limits of our ability to pay, now or in the future? The same ideology that treated land like an input for industrial agriculture, depleting it of available nutrients and filth had turned me away from caring for my own exquisite territory of body and soul. I came to call the kind of freedom we practice as Americans “hyper-freedom.” Freedom on steroids. We took “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as permission for all of us to seek our own good in a system we thought should get in our face the very least possible." - Vicki Robin

"Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"The last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don't know. But for me it is good." - Václav Havel

"The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer

"The first impulse of conscience is apt to be right; the first impulse of appetite or passion is generally wrong.-We should be faithful to the former, but suspicious of the latter." - Tryon Edwards

"It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"It seems unspeakably important that all persons among us, and especially the student and the writer, should be pervaded with Americanism. Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are steadily establishing it here. It includes the faith that to this good thing all other good things must in time be added. When a man is heartily imbued with such a national sentiment as this, it is as marrow in his bones and blood in his veins. He may still need culture, but he has the basis of all culture. He is entitled to an imperturbable patience and hopefulness, born of a living faith. All that is scanty in our intellectual attainments, or poor in our artistic life, may then be cheerfully endured: if a man sees his house steadily rising on sure foundations, he can wait or let his children wait for the cornice and the frieze. But if one happens to be born or bred in America without this wholesome confidence, there is no happiness for him; he has his alternative between being unhappy at home and unhappy abroad; it is a choice of martyrdoms for himself, and a certainty of martyrdom for his friends." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"My constant embarrassment is to restrain the emotions that are inside of me. You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like the fire from a far from extinct volcano, and if the lava does not seem to spill over it is because you are not high enough to see into the basin and see the caldron boil." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch." - Thurgood Marshall

"We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of the m ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit." - Tom Brown, Jr.

"Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Ambition's debt is paid." - William Shakespeare

"Come away! For you shall hence upon your wedding day." - William Shakespeare

"Come, Antony, and young Octavius, come, revenge yourselves alone on Cassius, for Cassius is aweary of the world; hated by one he loves; braved by his brother; cheque'd like a bondman; all his faults observed, set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote, to cast into my teeth. O, I could weep my spirit from mine eyes! There is my dagger, and here my naked breast; within, a heart dearer than Plutus' mine, richer than gold: if that thou be'st a Roman, take it forth; I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart: strike, as thou didst at Caesar; for, I know, when thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better than ever thou lovedst Cassius. Julius Caesar, Act iv, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare

"The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition — it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind — yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!" - William James

"Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward." - William Matthews

"Well, sir, I think it's just as well that they are being phased out of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the supernova bomb. In the very short time since we were released from the time envelope-' 'Get to the point''The robots aren't enjoying it, sir.''What?''The war sir, it seems to be getting them down there's a certain world-weariness.''Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping to destroy it.' 'yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are afflicted with a certain lassitude. They're just finding it hard to get behind the job. They lack oomph.''What are you trying to say?' 'Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir.' 'What on Krikkit are you talking about?' 'Well, in a few skirmishes they've recently, it seems that they go into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is it all about? And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim.' 'And then what do they do?' 'Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly difficult ones by all accounts. And then they sulk.' 'Sulk?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Whoever heard of a robot sulking?' 'I don't know, sir." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Even women are perfect at the outset." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"There is great skill in knowing how to conceal one's skill." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Life is full of uncertainties, perhanps one day some unforeseen circumstance would bring her into his life once more." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki

"Since the affairs of men rest still incertain, let's reason with the worst that may befall." - William Shakespeare

"Some come to take their ease And sleep an act or two." - William Shakespeare

"In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega--a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom share my body and life and money and energy with." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"A burnt child dreads the fire." - English Proverbs

"You take the best of our tradition as a start, and I'll take the best of Christianity ... From there we can build." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write." - Ernest Becker

"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is hap­pening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else." - Ernest Becker

"His decision had been staying in deep and dark, away from all the traps and bait and betrayals. My decision was to go there to look, beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are alone each other and has been since noon. And anyone who comes to avail ourselves, either him or me." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway