Great Throughts Treasury

"On the face of this old queen of French cathedrals, beside each wrinkle you always find a scar. Tempus edox, homo edacior, which I translate as: Time is blind, man stupid." - Victor Hugo

"The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius." - Victor Hugo

"The suicide of the soul is evil thought." - Victor Hugo

"What is done is but little by the side of what remains to be done. To destroy is the task: to build is the work. Progress demolishes with the left hand; it is with the right hand that it builds. The left hand of Progress is called Force; the right hand is called Mind." - Victor Hugo

"Indra only blesses those who perform good deeds, tread on the righteous path and perform religious sacrifices." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"A brahmachari is he, who tries to attain enlightenment while he is alive and aspires for 'salvation' after his death. He incessantly makes efforts to improve upon his intellect and knowledge and to treads on the path of truth. Quite naturally gods are pleased by him and dwell in his heart." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"As if a fire is burning him, as if the forest-fire burns in various directions, this jealousy of his do thou quench, as a fire (is quenched) with water." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Man is, they say, a monkey that has lost its tail; well, he must lose many more attributes of the monkey before he is entitled to call himself Man. He must dedicate his thought, word and deed to God and surrender to His Will. Then only is this animal entitled to become a Man in whom the Divine is enshrined." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"May 'enthusiasm' and 'superiority' remain together and bless us with wealth. May the enemy flee after being scared." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The earth that has heights, and slopes, and great plains, that supports the plants of manifold virtue, free from the pressure that comes from the midst of men, she shall spread out for us, and fit herself for us." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The earth that holds treasures manifold in secret places, wealth, jewels, and gold shall she give to me; she that bestows wealth liberally, the kindly goddess, wealth shall she bestow upon us." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The earth upon which the sea, and the rivers and the waters, upon which food and the tribes of men have arisen, upon which this breathing, moving life exists, shall afford us precedence in drinking." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The earth upon whom day and night jointly, black and bright, have been decreed, the broad earth covered and enveloped with rain, shall kindly place us into every pleasant abode." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The earth upon whom the noisy mortals sing and dance, upon whom they fight, upon whom resounds the roaring drum, shall drive forth our enemies, shall make us free from rivals." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The husband being the head of the family has it under his obligation to look after the whole family." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The quantity of riches one must earn can be compared to the shoes one wears; if too small, they cause pain; if too big, they are a hindrance to physical and mental comfort. When we have more, it breeds pride, sloth and contempt for others." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"There are three types of knowledge: Knowledge of matter-energy; knowledge of mental energy; and knowledge of cosmic energy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"You are like the rocks on the seashore that unflinchingly face the beating of the waves. The rock does not move; the wave will not stop. This predicament should end. Awake and avail yourselves of this unique chance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Husband and wife are advised to shun negative qualities such as fear, weakness, etc. and become strong, enthusiastic and optimistic so that peace and happiness prevail at home." - Yajur Veda, or Yajurveda

"Well may he be content to live a hundred years who acts without attachment who works his work with earnestness, but without desire, not yearning for its fruits – he, and he alone. – Isha Upanishad" - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL

"And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life" - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Comfort was allowed to come to them rare, welcome, unsought: a gift like joy." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself" - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"When a man has his heart in the right place and good taste, he can not only do well in politics but is even predetermined for it. If someone is modest and does not yearn for power, he is certainly not ill-equipped to engage in politics; on the contrary, he belongs there. What is needed in politics is not the ability to lie but rather the sensibility to know when, where, how and to whom to say things." - Václav Havel

"You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it." - Václav Havel

"And when there is no wind a beast draws along a huge cart, which is a grand sight." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"Man is not born crowned like the natural king of beasts, for beasts by this investiture have need to know the head they must obey." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"It becomes essential to choose one's path. Life consists in making these choices. One develops by choosing. It requires strength to become a child of God ..." - Toyohiko Kagawa

"Mountain won’t meet mountain, but man will meet man. (Be nice to people on your way up because you might meet them on your way down._" - Turkish Proverbs

"Good design is good business." - Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent." - Thomas Love Peacock

"Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"Few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"I feel no doubt whatever that the parish laws of England have contributed to raise the price of provisions and to lower the real price of labor." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error" - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The whole purport of literature... is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"Yes. Now you know. Now you know. That's what it was to be alive, to move about in a cloud of ignorance, to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those-- of those about you, to spend and waste time as if you had a million years, to be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Now you know, that's the 'happy' existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him." - Thucydides NULL

"The wide difference between the two characters, the slowness and want of energy of the Spartans as contrasted with the dash and enterprise of their opponents, proved of the greatest service, especially to a maritime empire like Athens. Indeed this was shown by the Syracusans, who were most like the Athenians in character, and also most successful in combating them." - Thucydides NULL

"Vision, like Love, takes no planning - for it just happens. It is directed by the Creator and made manifest by Creation. Take no care as to how you will live your Vision or how you will find your Love. For the Creator has planned all these things, and the way will become clear to your heart. You have been given a choice but if you listen to your Heart, there needs to be no choice. Your path is your Heart and all that you need to do is follow it." - Tom Brown, Jr.