Great Throughts Treasury

"Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Artists of all sorts remain youthful for so long, and in many cases attain a grand old age. The explanation is that they live in an almost permanent condition of stimulation and excitement." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

"The artist's view of the world and mankind is that which seeks as far as possible to lose itself in its object, illuminating it not from the outside by some light foreign to it, but from within, deriving light from its own core." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

"The highest, the only reality, is ever at hand, but for the most part invisible. Genius makes it visible... All knowing that goes beyond the immediate experience of the moment is a matter of faith." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

"Declare your line of conduct without reticence." - Egyptian Proverbs

"False ambition serves the neck." - Egyptian Proverbs

"No one can go above their status in life." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Put a rope around your neck and many will be happy to drag you along" - Egyptian Proverbs

"Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell." - Elif Safak

"Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?" - Elif Safak

"The Iron Rule of prudence for an Istanbulite Woman: If you are as fragile as a tea glass, either find a way to never encounter burning water and hope to marry an ideal husband or get yourself laid and broken as soon as possible. Alternatively, stop being a tea-glass woman!" - Elif Safak

"Annabelle heard him. Wild with affront, she scrambled heavily to her feet with a cowlike movement and dashed down the naked stairs. ‘Mother, mother’ she wailed. Her mother came out of the library. ‘Oh, mother, John said Damn to me!’" - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Towards the end of April, a breath from the north blew cold down Milan platforms to meet the returning traveler. Uncertain thoughts of home filled the station restaurant where the English sat lunching uneasily, facing the clock." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee." - William Shakespeare

"A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"If you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Prostration would become cold and drown in boredom fashionable to let your attention Liszt for." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Soon you start craving that intense attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld you probably turn sick, crazy and depleted not to mention resentful of the dealer who encourage this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore despite that you know that he has it hidden somewhere God dammit because you know that he used to give it to you for free." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in ones lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same ole addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma ( and also of western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, Let me take care of you forever, and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely . . ." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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

"As the moths around a taper, as the bees around a rose, as the gnats around a vapour, so the spirits group and close round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"That he, in his developed manhood, stood a little sunburnt by the glare of life; while I . . it seemed no sun had shone on me." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"You believe in God, for your part?--that He who makes can make good things from ill things, best from worst, as men plant tulips upon dunghills when they wish them finest." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen." - Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

"Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic." - Emil M. Cioran

"The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost." - Emil M. Cioran

"A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us." - Emile Gaboriau

"Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art." - Emile Zola

"The vision that had emerged from the invisible was returning to the invisible. It was no more an appearance that was fading away, having created an illusion. All is but a dream. And, at the peak of happiness, Angélique had vanished, in the faint breath of a kiss." - Emile Zola

"This must have led to a brief moment of psychological anguish. Note that, so far, General Billot was in no way compromised. Newly appointed to his position, he had the authority to bring out the truth. He did not dare, no doubt in terror of public opinion, certainly for fear of implicating the whole General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, and General Gonse, not to mention the subordinates. So he hesitated for a brief moment of struggle between his conscience and what he believed to be the interest of the military. Once that moment passed, it was already too late. He had committed himself and he was compromised. From that point on, his responsibility only grew, he took on the crimes of others, he became as guilty as they, if not more so, for he was in a position to bring about justice and did nothing. Can you understand this: for the last year General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible knowledge to themselves?" - Emile Zola

"My love for those I love — not many — not very many, but don't I love them so?" - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"A perfect misanthropist's heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"But when Strife was grown great in the limbs of the god and sprang forth to claim his prerogatives, in the fullness of the alternate time set for them by the mighty oath,….for all the limbs of the god in turn quaked." - Empedocles NULL

"A hedge between keeps friendship green." - English Proverbs

"A light purse makes a heavy heart." - English Proverbs

"A little body often harbors a great soul." - English Proverbs

"It's better to travel hopefully than to arrive." - English Proverbs

"Little knowledge is a dangerous thing." - English Proverbs

"Many men, many minds." - English Proverbs

"For we may ask in return, what has any secret purpose to do with our role of judgment and action? “Secret things,” we are told, “belong unto the Lord our God; but things which are revealed, unto us and to our children.” The question taken from the hidden purposes of the divine mind, can have no force whatever, because it is an appeal to our ignorance. We know, and can know nothing about them. One thing, however, we do know. God must be always and everywhere consistent with himself; and whether we can understand it or not, it is certain that there can be no inconsistency between revealed and unrevealed truths; and if God has made an offer of eternal life through the atonement unto all men, and commanded all men to embrace it, there cannot be in any purpose of God concerning its nature, anything which will clash with, and so contradict this universal offer." - Erskine Mason

"Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"If life is a bowl of cherries, then what am I doing in the pits?" - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste