Great Throughts Treasury

"I have made Thee my refuge, my terror and trembling, And when straitly besieged I have made Thee my tower, When to left and to right I have sought for a helper, I could look for dear life to no aid but Thy power. More than all earthly treasure I have made Thee my portion, Through all cares the delight and desire of my days, In the flood of Thy love I have rapture eternal And prayer is but an occasion for praise." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"DUOLOGUE - God: "Daughter of Zion, tried in Sorrow’s furnace, E’en as I swore thy fathers, be at rest. I swore it for My sake, and now thy crying Hath mounted to My habitation blest, And I have heard, for gracious is My breast." Israel: "Obeisance low I made, for I am feeble, Thy kindliness responds to all who yearn. Come back, dear Lord, whose name is linked with pardon, No other saviour Israel can discern, Unto his myriad families return!" God: "Where’er thy origin, whosoe’er thy master, A man shall come—nay, I—thy cause to plead, Whoever holds the bill of thy divorcement. Like wall or tower of fire I guard thy seed, Then wherefore weep or heart affrighted heed?" p. 29 Israel: "Why do I weep? Because Thou keepest silence, Though violence rages and, all uncontrolled, The mob destroys, and we as slaves to strangers, Master and man together, have been sold, And no Redeemer do our eyes behold." God: "Who art thou thus to shrink from man in terror And be dismayed because of mankind’s scorn? My angel I will send, as wrote the prophet, And gather Israel winnowed and new-born: This miracle shall be to-morrow morn." Israel: "To gather me my chieftains Thou didst promise, The day comes not and miracle is none, Nor see I Temple built nor any herald Of Peace arrive to be my Holy One— Ah, wherefore lingers Jesse’s promised son?" God: "Behold, I keep the oath I swore to gather My captives—kings shall bring their gifts to thee; Created for a witness to the nations, My holy ones shall testify to Me— Yea, Jesse’s son Mine eyes already see."" - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"My breast I am smiting, My own sins indicting. How then canst Thou draw me To strife and thus awe me, And bring Me to judgment? My branch hangeth ailing, My eyelid is failing, My aims to derision Are turned by the vision Of Thee bringing judgment. The creditor calleth, The dread decree falleth, The awful day breaking God’s creatures sets quaking In fear of His judgment. Through Thy attributes preaching, Almighty, and teaching, O weigh aberration In the scale of salvation, Nor bring us to judgment. In Thy merciful fashion Award us compassion, That man who but dust is May handle with justice The haters of judgment. Like a vapour evanished, Man is melted and banished, His birth is coëval With a harvest of evil, ’Tis Thou must bring judgment. We await—O behold us— Thy love to enfold us. Did Thy warning not hasten Our impulse to chasten? For the Lord loveth judgment." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"I can reveal to you that I wished to die - For with much weeping she left me Saying: "Sappho - what suffering is ours! For it is against my will that I leave you." In answer, I said: "Go, happily remembering me For you know what we shared and pursued - If not, I wish you to see again our [former joys]... The many braids of rose and violet you [wreathed] Around yourself at my side And the many garlands of flowers With which you adorned your soft neck: With royal oils from [fresh flowers] You anointed [ yourself ] And on soft beds fulfilled your longing [For me] " - Sappho NULL

"One who possesses patience continues bestowing goodness after being insulted or witnessing sin, exactly as before. He does not withhold his kindness from the one who insulted him or has sinned. This requires the ability to think precisely, to make fine distinction between subtleties. Only such a deep thinker will realize that true patience demands that he continue bestowing goodness and kindness without any change even when a response to the insult or sin is called for. A measured response should come, but never amid the abandonment of the goodness and kindness that is the very physical and spiritual sustenance of the other individual. " - Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe

"Patience in the home, with one’s family, requires a separate and unique treatment. The closer the relationship is, the more patience that relationship demands. We come into contact with our friends from time to time, and even when we do, we rarely will quarrel or become angry. In contrast, we come into contact with our neighbors all the time and thus struggle through many instances requiring patience. Indeed, it is more difficult to be a good neighbor than a good friend. However, it is most difficult to maintain our patience when it comes to our family, with whom we spend our days and nights, through all types of situations. It is fair to say that the middah which sustains a proper household is patience." - Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe

"Body is not veiled from soul, neither soul from body, yet no man hath ever seen a soul." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"It is Love and the Lover that live eternally - Don't lend your heart to anything else; all else is borrowed." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"The Prophets accept all agony and trust it for the water has never feared the fire." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Through love scraps of copper are turned to gold." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"When you are with everyone but me, you're with no one. When you are with no one but me, you're with everyone. Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone. When you become that many, you're nothing. Empty." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Every child I know who overcame long odds and grew into a responsible adult can point to an adult who stepped into his or her life as a friend, mentor, and guide. Don’t be too concerned that your children don’t listen to you. But be very concerned that they see everything you do. Be so consistent in your discipline that you’re boring. Stop arguing in front of your children. You may think children have outgrown the desire to be rocked to sleep at night. They haven’t. Children will never believe in the covenant of marriage unless they see you living it with their own eyes. How do you know if a child needs encouragement? If he or she is breathing." - S. Truett Cathy

"Do good even to the wicked; it is as well to shut a dog's mouth with a crumb." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"A woman who intentionally destroys a fetus is guilty of murder. And we do not even talk about the fine distinction as to its being completely formed or unformed." - Saint Basil, aka Basil of Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great NULL

"A merciful man is the physician of his own soul. Like a violent wind he drives the darkness of the passions out of his inner self." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

"A Priest, like an angel of the Almighty Lord, ought to be above all passions and spiritual disturbances, above all worldly or vain attachments and fears, occasioned by demons; he ought to be entirely in God, to love and fear Him alone. The fear of man means that he does not yet entirely cleave to God." - Saint John of Kronstadt, fully John Il’ich Serguiev, aka Holy Father John of the Kronstadt NULL

"I can understand that the man you told me about has offended you, and I am very annoyed that he forgot himself like that. However, you must not consider what he did as coming from him but rather as a trial which God wishes to make of your patience. This virtue will be even more a virtue in you who are more sensitive by nature and have given less cause for the offense that you have received." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed." - Samuel Butler

"To do nothing is in every man’s power; we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties. The lapse to indolence is soft and imperceptible, because it is only a mere cessation of activity; but the return to diligence is difficult, because it implies a change from rest to motion, from privation to reality." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It is a dangerous policy to claim that we are acting improperly because of destiny or fate." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL

"It is a weak thing to tell half your story, and then ask your friend's advice--a still weaker thing to take it." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"Some students require great mildness, while others need to be directed with firmness." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

"I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Included in this almost nothing, as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet—an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The enraged man always appears as the gang-leader of his own self, giving his unconscious the order to pull no punches, his eyes shining with the satisfaction of speaking for the many that he himself is. The more someone has espoused the cause of his own aggression, the more perfectly he represents the repressive principle of society. In this sense more than in any other, perhaps, the proposition is true that the most individual is the most general." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Reasoning with a drunkard is like going under water with a torch to seek for a drowning man." - Thiruvalluvar NULL

"Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous." - Thomas Hobbes

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." - Thomas Jefferson

"I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of the bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night, alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night... the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world." - Thomas Merton

"There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand." - Thomas Merton

"The Sun shineth as well on the good as the bad: God from on high beholdeth all the workers of iniquity, as well as the upright of heart." - Thomas Nashe

"When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Good will is not a single quality. It is a composite of all the qualities of the spirit, applied to daily living." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand." - Walter Savage Landor

"I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters, who, like deer, goats, and diverse other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure and retarding their progress to maturity." - Washington Irving

"There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place." - Washington Irving

"The power of intention manifests as an expression of expanding creativity, kindness, love, and beauty." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace. If you have a question about whether it is your ego or your higher self speaking, the answer becomes obvious when you ask yourself, Will this bring peace or turmoil to my life? Peace is not found in being right or being hurt or being angry." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Adversity, how blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of guilt." - Hugh Blair

"There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape." - William Godwin

"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

"A man after death, is not a natural but a spiritual man; nevertheless he still appears in all respects like himself." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg