Great Throughts Treasury

"Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"Piety and morality are but the same spirit differently manifested. Piety is religion with its face toward God; morality is religion with its face toward the world." - Tryon Edwards

"Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"History is philosophy learned from examples." - Thucydides NULL

"I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire." - Thucydides NULL

"A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be." - C. S. Peirce, fully Charles Sanders Peirce

"Devotion signifies a life given, or devoted to God. He therefore is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life, parts of piety, by doing everything in the name of God, and under such rules as are conformable to his Glory." - William Law

"He that rightly understands the reasonableness and excellency of charity will know that it can never be excusable to waste any of our money in pride and folly." - William Law

"Our merit gains us the esteem of the virtuous; our star, that of the public." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"People who think they can live mean penance others lie to ourselves, but those who think other people cannot live without him be wrong again." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"We are oftener treacherous through weakness than through calculation." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Do not fail to obey the commands of your Sovereign. He is like Heaven, which is above the Earth, and the vassal is like the Earth, which bears up Heaven. When Heaven and Earth are properly in place, the four seasons follow their course and all is well in Nature. But if the Earth attempts to take the place of Heaven, Heaven would simply fall in ruin. That is why the vassal listens when the lord speaks, and the inferior obeys when the superior acts. Consequently when you receive the commands of your Sovereign, do not fail to carry them out or ruin will be the natural result." - Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya

"How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety." - Elif Safak

"Sir, I am about to weep; but, thinking that We are a queen (or long have dreamed so), certain The daughter of a king, my drops of tears I'll turn to sparks of fire." - William Shakespeare

"It is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors — that the master is lesser than the slave." - Elizabeth Gould Davis

"Some keep the Sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Really, Miss Catherine, how can I know?' I replied. 'To be sure, considering the exhibition you performed in his presence this afternoon, I might say it would be wise to refuse him: since he asked you after that, he must either be hopelessly stupid or a venturesome fool." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimize it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The arising of this error, so egregious and so firmly rooted, is closely connected with the philosophical, not to say religious, changes during the last three or four centuries in man's attitude to natureÂ…Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Prepare yourselves for the roaring voice of the God of Joy!" - Euripedes NULL

"Love and esteem are the first principles of friendship, which always is imperfect where either of these two is wanting." - Eustace Budgell

"My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing worlds, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called Science." - Gustave Flaubert