Great Throughts Treasury

"In doubt if an action is just, abstain." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"Badness is an admission of failure. Think about this all day." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"It is utterly useless to try to change the outer world, for it is but a reflection of inner causes. The true seeker seeks to change himself." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"There is no natural need to be bad." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Whenever troubled about something, ask yourself, “Exactly who is troubled?” Now, if this troubled person does not truly represent your real nature, could the trouble exist except in wrong thinking? No, it could not. Do not pass by this idea. Stick with it for all you are worth, for it is the secret of secrets." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"You still want something from man instead of everything from God." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent." - Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum

"Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do." - Victor Hugo

"Beautiful with a beauty that combined all of the women with all of the angels, a beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel," - Victor Hugo

"He had been married and had had offspring. He did not know what had become of his wife and children. He had lost them the way he might have lost his handkerchief." - Victor Hugo

"I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"God is naturally pervading all places. Sometimes He is hidden, and sometimes He is revealed; thus God has made the world of His making. He Himself wakes us from sleep. No one can estimate His value, although everyone has tried, over and over again, to describe Him." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Rising or sitting, standing or walking, may we not stumble with our right or left foot upon the earth." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"To hear, one must be silent." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility." - Václav Havel

"Modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy — that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations." - Václav Havel

"We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Oh, misfortune, I forgive you when you come alone." - Turkish Proverbs

"There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"Concessions to adversaries only end in self-reproach, and the more strictly they are avoided the greater will be the chance of security." - Thucydides NULL

"For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him." - Thucydides NULL

"Landing a single punch on your enemies nose is more satisfying than hearing well-intentioned advice from your elders." - Tibetan Proverbs

"Amoebae leave no fossils. They haven't any bones. (No teeth, no belt buckles, no wedding rings.) It is impossible, therefore, to determine how long amoebae have been on Earth." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"BEATRICE: What is he to a lord? Messenger: A lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuffed with all honourable virtues. Beatrice: It is so indeed, he is no less than a stuffed man, but for the stuffing, — Well, we are all mortal. Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians." - William James

"The difference between a good man and a bad man is the choice of cause." - William James

"Do not be afraid of large patterns, if properly designed they are more restful to the eye than small ones: on the whole, a pattern where the structure is large and the details much broken up is the most useful... very small rooms, as well as very large ones, look better ornamented with large patterns." - William Morris

"There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"We arrive at the various stages of life quite as novices." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"O! while you live, tell truth, and shame the devil." - William Shakespeare

"O, when degree is shaked, which is the ladder of all high designs, the enterprise is sick. How could communities, degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, peaceful commerce from dividable shores, the primogeniture and due of birth, prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels, but by degree stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows. Each thing meets in mere oppugnancy." - William Shakespeare

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven. All's Well That Ends Well" - William Shakespeare

"If wives suppress not contempt for husbands, then it follows that such wives rebuke and scold their husbands. If husbands stop not short of anger, then they are certain to beat their wives. The correct relationship between husband and wife is based upon harmony and intimacy, and conjugal love is grounded in proper union. Should actual blows be dealt, how could matrimonial relationship be preserved? Should sharp words be spoken, how could conjugal love exist? If love and proper relationship both be destroyed, then husband and wife are divided." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away." - Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL

"Once a person is able to achieve true singlemindedness in his practice and smash apart the old nest... into which he has settled... Wisdom immediately appears... and the all-discerning Fivefold Eye opens wide." - Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL

"True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it." - Edwin Way Teale

"We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

"They swerved north a little at Uxbridge and spun into London by the great empty bye-pass of Western Avenue. Small new shops stood distracted among the buttercups; in the distance aërial glassy white factories were beginning to go up among forlorn may trees, branch lines and rusty girders: here and there one was starting to build Jerusalem. Emmeline smiled at London, where her friends still slept under the haze of shining smoke." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"This is very nice, said Mr. Barlow, looking at the Contessina. She had on a dress of heliotrope organdie, with a fichu folded across the bosom with that best discretion for the display of pretty curves. Her skin was very dark against the heliotrope, as fresh as a young petal, as brown as old, old ivory." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"So, on your patience evermore attending, new joy wait on you! Here our play has ending." - William Shakespeare

"I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There's a reason they call God a presence-because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you anymore. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers." - Emile Zola