Great Throughts Treasury

"I'd like to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: Without seeing Sicily, one can not have a clear idea of Italy ." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"But so fair, She takes the breath of men away Who gaze upon her unaware." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Sing, seraph with the glory! heaven is high. Sing, poet with the sorrow! earth is low. The universe's inward voices cry "Amen" to either song of joy and woe. Sing, seraph, poet! sing on equally!" - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Let us... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The Bible never refers to the past as “the good old days.”" - Eugene Peterson

"A good deed never goes unpunished." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I we're pregnant with a rock." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The idea of a poem European music and colorful had been in Bell , as well as instinct, a matter of culture, but some had been accompanied or preceded, in him, a practice some more 'inert and passive of the new isms found in air. Even futurism official had demanded, as the innovators of the century, to break the windows, to renew the air. Bell, however, had chosen the finest masters of those followed by his provisional initiators. Repudiated by instinct the more mechanical, more elencativa of liberalism fashion, and went, one can safely say this also in fact, to the most reliable sources of that movement, from Whitman toRimbaud . He reported on his own, in art and life, a matter of style in a matter of consciousness and was aware of representing, in his time and in its environment, a new voice, different." - Eugenio Montale

"I find but few beards worth taking notice of in the reign of King James the First." - Eustace Budgell

"The great task of life is to learn the will of the Lord and then do it." - Ezra Taft Benson

"A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound