Great Throughts Treasury

"I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one." - Victor Hugo

"It is by suffering that human beings become angels." - Victor Hugo

"Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

"One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean." - Victor Hugo

"The book will kill the building!" - Victor Hugo

"There must be extravagance in happiness; rapture must be spiced with superfluity... Happiness unadorned is like unbuttered bread: one may eat it but one does not dine." - Victor Hugo

"You insist on the example [of the death penalty]. Why? For what it teaches. What do you want to teach with your example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach thou shalt not kill? By killing." - Victor Hugo

"Belief is the wound that knowledge heals." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"What we call a personality is nothing more or less than an amazingly interwoven fabric of impermanent events" - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"My grandmother, he said, confessed to me once that before she'd ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she'd make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you've seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It's a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn." - William Gurnall

"No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed." - William James

"With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure, no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. . . ." - William James

"This useful, charitable, humble employment of yourselves is what I recommend to you with greatest earnestness, as being a substantial part of a wise and pious life." - William Law

"Forsooth, ye have heard it said that ye shall do well in this world that in the world to come ye may live happily for ever; do ye well then, and have your reward both on earth and in heaven; for I say to you that earth and heaven are not two but one; and this one is that which ye know, and are each one of you a part of, to wit, the Holy Church, and in each one of you dwelleth the life of the Church, unless ye slay it." - William Morris

"Of rich men it telleth, and strange is the story how they have, and they hanker, and grip far and wide And they live and they die, and the earth and its glory has been but a burden they scarce might abide." - William Morris

"What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Local newspapers may be lulling themselves into a false sense of security by thinking they can reverse their subscriber loss somehow, some way. Barring some amazing innovation that no one has yet envisioned, and that’s certainly a possibility, print media subscriber loss will not be reversed under any circumstances. A company depending on unheard-of innovation for its survival is about as effective as you depending on the lottery to cover your retirement." - Drew Curtis

"Most people I’ve talked to are convinced that they’re not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I’m not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them." - Drew Curtis

"O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified." - William Shakespeare

"O, if I say, you look upon this verse, when I perhaps compounded am with clay, do not so much as my poor name rehearse, but let your love even with my life decay; lest the wise world should look into your moan, and mock you with me after I am gone." - William Shakespeare

"O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear!" - William Shakespeare

"One sin, I know, another doth provoke. Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke." - William Shakespeare

"He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are." - Edwin Arlington Robinson

"There is nothing more to say, they have all gone away from the house on the hill." - Edwin Arlington Robinson

"A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first." - Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL

"Hell is the here and now. Heaven too. Stop being afraid of hell and dream of paradise, because the one and the other is set in the present moment. Every time you fall in love, to ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy or confront someone, fall right into hellfire." - Elif Safak

"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

"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

"Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well-known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

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

"To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes." - Dorothy Parker

"There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil." - Dorothy Parker

"When I get up in the morning I brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue." - Dorothy Parker

"The act of exploring what the men are, and moreover the separation of the good from the evil, is visitation; and the good are then removed, and the evil are left behind." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"The Lord, from His Divine love by His Divine wisdom, provides the means by which people can be saved; and these means are present with every person born into the world." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known" - Emil M. Cioran

"I am the only being whose doom no tongue would ask no eye would mourn I never caused a thought of gloom a smile of joy since I was born in secret pleasure — secret tears this changeful life has slipped away as friendless after eighteen years as lone as on my natal day." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Oh, if God would but give me strength to strangle him in my last agony, I’d go to hell with joy." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!" - Emma Goldman

"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." - English Proverbs

"He had spent most of his lifetime studying the art of medicine and realized now that he would never really understand its mysteries. For medicine is an eternal quest for reasons - causes that explain effects. Science cannot comprehend a miracle." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"You don't know about falling off cliffs, Prep­pie,' she said. 'You never fell off one in your god­damn life.' 'Yeah,' I said, re­cov­er­ing the power of speech. 'When I met you." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway