Great Throughts Treasury

"One must love everything." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers ... Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft in the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hallowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own thoughts." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Strangely enough, you could smell violets, or if violets were impossible in July, they must grow something very pungent on the mainland then. The mainland, not so very far off—you could see clefts in the cliffs, white cottages, smoke going up—wore an extraordinary look of calm, of sunny peace, as if wisdom and piety had descended upon the dwellers there. Now a cry sounded, as of a man calling pilchards in a main street. It wore an extraordinary look of piety and peace, as if old men smoked by the door, and girls stood, hands on hips, at the well, and horses stood; as if the end of the world had come, and cabbage fields and stone walls, and coast-guard stations, and, above all, the white sand bays with the waves breaking unseen by any one, rose to heaven in a kind of ecstasy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life... one must become externalized; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"In a false man, thought is the king and the spirit is considered an enemy." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"It is a true miracle when a man finally sees himself as his only opposition." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"To change what you get you must change who you are" - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"We learn to escape from self-defeating behavior in small ways at first. You can do this by thinking of present situations where you now say YES but wish you could stop. Recall several small situations. Perhaps you have agreed to meet regularly with a friend or relative but realize that it is really a burden. Maybe you agreed to take the leadership in a certain project but now you wish you had declined. You now know WHERE you must say NO. The next step is also clear. SAY NO. Make the necessary contact and resign. Just like that. Do it even if you feel nervous about it. Don’t listen to your timidity. Do what is right. Do you know what you are doing! You are getting your life back!" - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"A weakness natural to superior and to little men, when they have committed a fault, is to wish to make it pass as a work of genius, a vast combination which the vulgar cannot comprehend. Pride says these things and folly credits them." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

"One can never be the judge of another's grief. That which is a sorrow to one, to another is joy. Let us not dispute with any one concerning the reality of his sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries - each man has his own." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

"A social deformity perhaps still more hideous than the evil rich: the evil poor" - Victor Hugo

"A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference." - Victor Hugo

"All I know is that you love me...in my dreams." - Victor Hugo

"Fashions have done more harm than revolutions." - Victor Hugo

"Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

"In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven." - Victor Hugo

"In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually." - Victor Hugo

"It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe." - Victor Hugo

"Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them." - Victor Hugo

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul." - Victor Hugo

"She had always been naked under the biting north wind of misfortune, and now it seemed to her she was clothed. Before her soul had been cold; now it was warm." - Victor Hugo

"Skepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind." - Victor Hugo

"To live is to understand. To live is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall." - Victor Hugo

"You have suffered greatly, poor mother. Oh! do not lament, you have now the portion of the elect. It is in this way that mortals become angels. It is not their fault; they do not know how to set about it otherwise. This hell from which you have come out is the first step towards Heaven. We must begin by that." - Victor Hugo

"As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps - concentration camps, that is - and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"In between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"The best contribution one can make to humanity is to improve oneself." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. 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

"Good thoughts inspire us to engage in good actions." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"It is all God, an expression of His Majesty. Derive joy from the springs of joy within you and without you; advance, do not stand still or recede." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The earth holds the fool and holds the wise, endures that good and bad dwell (upon her); she keeps company with the boar, gives herself up to the wild hog." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The Supreme Lord God is Merciful to the meek; meditating in remembrance on Him, peace is obtained." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"This is the reason why we should try to bring unison in thoughts, words and deeds because it is of prime importance for the welfare of society as well as nation." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"True-knowledge brings good health, strength and long life to a man." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The Self is within all, and it is without all. – Isha Upanishad" - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL

"Through purity of food comes purity of mind, through purity of mind comes a steady memory of Truth, and when one gets this memory one becomes free from all knots of the heart. – Chandogya Upanishad" - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL

"Dangerous! Vea laughed radiantly. What an utterly marvelous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek? Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction, you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin