Great Throughts Treasury

"That sovereign is a tyrant who knows no law but his own caprice." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The passions are the winds that fill the sails of the vessel. - They sink it at times; but without them it would be impossible to make way. - Many things that are dangerous here below, are still necessary." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"A light here required a shadow there." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there, there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It’s on the field, it’s on the pane, it’s in the sky — beauty; and I can’t get at it; I can’t have it — I, she seemed to add, with that little clutch of the hand which was so characteristic, who adore it so passionately, would give the whole world to possess it!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern." - Victor Hugo

"Mayor Madeline: The two highest functionaries of the state are the wet nurse and the school teacher." - Victor Hugo

"The bourgeois in their Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, often said, eyeing it scornfully with their bulging eyes, What's the use of that? Its use was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to spare from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever and from sleeping in the snow, which breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no sanctuary. Its use was to receive the innocent whom society repelled....This idea of Napoleon's, disdained by men, had been taken up by God. What had been merely illustrious had become august...The emperor had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower and making the joyous and vivifying waters gush out on all sides around him, he wanted to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he sheltered a child." - Victor Hugo

"Do not lay the blame on Godhead, as you are prone to do. When everything goes right you say that God has come close to you; when something goes wrong you say that God has deserted you and gone far away. He does not move far or near." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"O camel-like mind, you were once very pure; the filth of egotism has now attached itself to you." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Stealing the wealth of others, coveting another man’s wife and doubting the integrity and character of friends - these three lead to one’s destruction." - Valmiki NULL

"Then the music strikes up, and freely they pardon the offences and faults of the enemy, and after the victories they are kind to them, if it has been decreed that they should destroy the walls of the enemy's city and take their lives." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"A few years ago, a motion picture version appeared of Sophocles' immortal tragedy "Oedipus Rex". This picture played only in the so-called art theaters, and it was not a financial success. And I maintain that the reason it was not a financial success... you're way ahead of me... was that it did not have a title tune which the people could hum, and which would make them actually eager to attend this particular...flick. So, I've attempted to supply this, and here then is the prospective title song from "Oedipus Rex"." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer

"Heart endures when eye does not see. (Meaning: One can endure being far away from loved ones by not seeing them.)" - Turkish Proverbs

"Many will point to the right way after the wheel is broken. (Used to make a point about second guessing after the outcome is known.)" - Turkish Proverbs

"What a man is at seven is also what he is at seventy. (Used when expressing dissatisfaction in unchanged human behavior or the fact that one never learns from one's mistakes.)" - Turkish Proverbs

"No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do..." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The father may well be a horse, but it's most likely that the son will be a mule." - Tibetan Proverbs

"Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"And since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself, that of yourself which you yet know not of. Julius Caeasar, Act I, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou her maid art far more fair than she. Be not her maid, since she is envious. Her vestal livery is but sick and green, and none but fools do wear it. Cast it off." - William Shakespeare

"As for a camel to thread the postern of a small needle's eye. King Richard II. Act v. Sc. 5." - William Shakespeare

"Ay, to the proof, as mountains are for winds, that shakes not, though they blow perpetually." - William Shakespeare

"Be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend, Under thy own life's key." - William Shakespeare

"BOTTOM: What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant? QUINCE: A lover that kills himself, most gallant, for love. Bottom. That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes." - William Shakespeare

"By a divine instinct men's minds distrust ensuing danger, as by proof we see the waters swell before a boisterous storm." - William Shakespeare

"Come, our stomachs will make what's homely savory." - William Shakespeare

"In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut eachothers’ throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing amodus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in." - William James

"Persons that are well affected to religion, that receive instructions of piety with pleasure and satisfaction, often wonder how it comes to pass that they make no greater progress in that religion which they so much admire. Now the reason of it is this: it is because religion lives only in their head, but something else has possession of their heart; and therefore they continue from year to year mere admirers and praisers of piety, without ever coming up to the reality and perfection of its precepts." - William Law

"Soldiers looked at as they ought to be. They are to the world as poppies to corn-fields." - Douglas William Jerrold

"If it requires great tact to speak to the purpose, it requires no less to know when to be silent." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"O heaven! that one might read the book of fate, and see the revolution of the times." - William Shakespeare

"O you mighty gods! This world I do renounce, and in your sights shake patiently my great affliction off. If I could bear it longer, and not fall to quarrel with your great opposeless wills, my snuff and loathed part of nature should burn itself out." - William Shakespeare

"The biggest guru-mantra is: never share your secrets with anybody. It will destroy you." - Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL

"She should have died hereafter; there would have been time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -

"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser

"Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion." - Emil M. Cioran