Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing venture, nothing have." - Italian Proverbs

"Of the wealth of the world each has as much as they take." - Italian Proverbs

"Soon crooks the tree That good gambrel would be." - Italian Proverbs

"Where there is nothing to gain, there is a lot to lose." - Italian Proverbs

"You are more likely to win if you take the initiative and make an attack rather than preparing to defend yourself." - Italian Proverbs

"I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"I have not been nourished by English Literature... for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ?mad?. . . but I don?t believe I am... I set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien