Great Throughts Treasury

"The Coward is one who, on a voyage, will protest that the promontories are pirates; and, if a high sea gets up, will ask if there is any one on board who has not been initiated." - Theophrastus NULL

"God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!" - William Blake

"In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas— and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"We must fight against the old habit of regarding the measure of labor and the means of production from the point of view of the slave whose sole aim is to lighten the burden of labor or to obtain at least some little bit from the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Success comes before work only in the dictionary." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily... Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been too happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"A bird will not fly with one wing." - Turkish Proverbs

"A mockingbird ... was heard to blend the songs of 32 different kinds of birds into a ten minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"A perfumer, of course, is neither a quantum physicist nor a painter, but at his best, when his purposes are high purposes, when his imagination is liberated, his choices inspired, he, too, enters the poetic. And it is revealed to him, then, what the ancients meant when they said with conviction that the soul receives its sustenance via the sense of smell." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Our total consolidated earnings were obviously battered by the charges related to our Brazil investments. However, we continue making good progress in streamlining our business portfolio." - William Harvey

"Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call fourth. … Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. … Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives fare within his limits he possesses powers of various sorts he habitually fails to use." - William James

"There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Thomas proceeded conversationally like the impeccable dentist with an infinitesimally fine instrument, choosing his area, tapping within it nearer and nearer, withdrawing at a suggestion before there had been time for a wince. He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily-married couple; adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality. An indifference to, an apparent unconsciousness of, life in some aspects armored him against embarrassments. As Janet said, he would follow one into one’s bedroom without noticing. Yet the too obvious ‘tact’, she said, was the literal word for his quality. Thomas was all finger-tips." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"I still can’t say whether I ever want children….I can only say how I feel now--grateful to be on my own. I also know that I won’t go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don’t think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!" - Emile Zola

"Before hastening to secure a possible reward of five taels by dragging an unobservant person away from a falling building, examine well his features lest you find, when too late, that it is one to whom you are indebted for double that amount." - Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

"Free as air; that's what they say- free as air. Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"War begun, hell unchained." - Italian Proverbs