Great Throughts Treasury

"But the strong base and building of my love is as the very centre of the earth, drawing all things to it." - William Shakespeare

"Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand, and the youth, mistook by me, pleading for a lover's fee. Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!" - William Shakespeare

"Die for adultery! No: The wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. King Lear, Act iv, Scene 6" - William Shakespeare

"I hate solitude, but i'm afraid if intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself." - Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

"A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, emboweled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions." - William Godwin

"Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart." - William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters

"I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly." - William James

"Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic." - William James

"Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light." - William Law

"Take away this measure from our dress and habits, and all is turned into such paint, and glitter, and ridiculous ornaments, as are a real shame to the wearer." - William Law

"There is no wrath that stands between God and us, but what is awakened in the dark fire of our own fallen nature; and to quench this wrath, and not His own, God gave His only begotten Son to be made man. God has no more wrath in Himself now than He had before the creation, when He had only Himself to love... And it was solely to quench this wrath, awakened in the human soul, that the blood of the Son of God was necessary; because nothing but a life and birth, derived from Him into the human soul, could change this darkened root of a self-tormenting fire into an amiable image of the Holy Trinity as it was at first created." - William Law

"What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?" - William Law

"What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet, a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast." - William Matthews

"I too will go, remembering what I said to you, when any land, the first to which we came seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame, and all seemed won to you: but still I think, perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink, unless by some ill chance I first am slain. But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain." - William Morris

"What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo?" - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

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

"Mr. Hume sometimes employs (after the manner of the French metaphysicians) sentiment as synonymous with feeling,—a use of the word quite unprecedented in our tongue." - Dugald Stewart

"Now, for not looking on a woman's face, you have in that forsworn the use of eyes, and study too, the causer of your vow; for where in any author in the world teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?" - William Shakespeare

"Now, neighbor confines, purge you of your scum! Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways?" - William Shakespeare

"O happy fair! Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue's sweet air more tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear when wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear." - William Shakespeare

"O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!" - William Shakespeare

"O hateful Error, Melancholy's child! Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? O Error, soon conceiv'd, Thou never com'st unto a happy birth, But kill'st the mother that engender'd thee." - William Shakespeare

"O hateful hands, to tear such loving words! Injurious wasps, to feed on such sweet honey, and kill the bees, that yield it, with your stings! I'll kiss each several paper for amends. Look, here is writ — kind Julia. — Unkind Julia! As in revenge of thy ingratitude, I throw thy name against the bruising stones, trampling contemptuously on thy disdain. And here is writ — love-wounded Proteus. Poor wounded name! My bosom, as a bed, shall lodge thee, till thy wound be thoroughly healed; and thus I search it with a sovereign kiss. But twice or thrice was Proteus written down. Be calm, good wind, blow not a word away, till I have found each letter in the letter, except mine own name: that some whirlwind bear unto a ragged, fearful, hanging rock, and throw it thence into the raging sea! Lo, here in one line is his name twice writ, — Poor forlorn Proteus, passionate Proteus, to the sweet Julia. That I'll tear away; and yet I will not, sith so prettily he couples it to his complaining names. Thus will I fold them one upon another, now kiss, embrace, contend, do what you will. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act i, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"O my good lord, At many times I brought in my accounts, Laid them before you. You would throw them off And say you found them in mine honesty." - William Shakespeare

"Patience is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts." - William Shakespeare

"Put a stout heart to a steep hill." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Insight is within the grasp of the dreamer, for he escapes the waking intensity which tends to hold back the vitality that bids us carry on with life, often as underground levels. The eternal now instinctively carries us forward and contains within it knowledge and experience of the routes ahead, even though those routes are dimmed when we awaken to each day's new experiences. The prediction is clear in a dreaming world, but the route is clouded when we surface to live out the day's experience. The outer eye discerns only what is to be undertaken in a three-dimensional world." - Eileen Garrett

"The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling, and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned at it." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"So cowards fight when they can fly no further; So doves do peck the falcon's piercing talons; So desperate thieves, all hopeless of their lives, Breathe out invectives 'gainst the officers. King Henry the Sixth, Part III (Clifford at I, iv)" - William Shakespeare

"So holy and so perfect is my love, And I in such a poverty of grace, That I shall think it a most plenteous crop To glean the broken ears after the man That the main harvest reaps." - William Shakespeare

"And love is always complicated. But still humans most try to love each other, darling. We must get out hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"How much do you love me?' and Who's in charge? ....these two questions of LOVE and CONTROL undo us ALL, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering. People follow different paths, straight or crooked, according to their temperament, depending on which they consider best, or most appropriate -- and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I want to have a lasting experience of God, I told him. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self. - pg 20-21" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Listen to me. Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Loneliness watches and sights, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over... himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, i just know it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"What kind of dog is that? I would always give the same answer: She's a brown dog. Similarly, when the question is raised, What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"You have no idea how strong my love is!" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life." - Elizabeth Lesser

"All men are possible heroes: every age, heroic in proportions, double-faced, looks backward and before, expects a morn and claims an epos. Ay, but every age appears to souls who live in it (ask Carlyle) most unheroic." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"The growing drama has outgrown such toys Of simulated stature, face, and speech: It also peradventure may outgrow The simulation of the painted scene, Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, And take for a worthier stage the soul itself, Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, With all its grand orchestral silences To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate; As the voyage along thru life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox