Great Throughts Treasury

"Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth. The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

"When words are put together in fresh ways there is a pleasure-giving quality in language, which brings a release of endorphins." - William Collins

"The same work will wear a different appearance in the eyes of the same man, according to the different views with which he reads it: if merely for his amusement, his candour being in less danger of a twist from interest or prejudice, he is pleased with what is really pleasing, and is not over-curious to discover a blemish,—because the exercise of a minute exactness is not consistent with his purpose. But if he once becomes a critic by trade, the case is altered. He must then at any rate establish, if he can, an opinion in every mind of his uncommon discernment, and his exquisite taste. This great end he can never accomplish by thinking in the track that has been beaten under the hoof of public judgment. He must endeavour to convince the world that their favourite authors have more faults than they are aware of, and such as they have never suspected. Having marked out a writer universally esteemed, whom he finds it for that very reason convenient to depreciate and traduce, he will overlook some of his beauties, he will faintly praise others, and in such a manner as to make thousands, more modest though quite as judicious as himself, question whether they are beauties at all." - William Cowper

"When an Office Holder, or one that has been found out, can’t think of anything to deliver a speech on, he always falls back on the good old subject, AMERICANISM." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Disneyland is something that will never be finished. It's something that I can keep developing. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need change. A picture is a thing, once you wrap it up and turn it over to Technicolor, you're through. Snow White is a dead issue with me. But I can change the park, because it's alive." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade." - Walter Savage Landor

"He had been indulging in fanciful speculations on spiritual essences until he had an ideal world of his own around him." - Washington Irving

"Here's to your good health, and your family's good health, and may you all live long and prosper." - Washington Irving

"Realize there is no such thing as failure." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Your physical self is inspired by a divine force that beats it's heart, digests it's food and grows it's fingernails, and this same force is receptive to endlessly abundant health." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Everyone who achieves success in a great venture solves each problem as they come to it. They helped themselves. And they were helped through powers known and unknown to them at the time they set out on their voyage. They kept going regardless of the obstacles they met." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone

"Give time for a worthy cause (with eagerness) — you will be worthy and richly rewarded." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone

"There can indeed be little doubt that for nearly two hundred years after its establishment in Europe, the Christian community exhibited a moral purity which, if it has been equaled, has never for any long period been surpassed. Completely separated from the Roman world that was around them, abstaining alike from political life, from appeals to the tribunals, and from military occupations; looking forward continually to the immediate advent of their Master, and the destruction of the Empire in which they dwelt, and animated by all the fervor of a young religion, the Christiana found within themselves a whole order of ideas and feelings sufficiently powerful to guard them from the contamination of their age." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellow-ly blurred, illusive, lost." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored kins, 'thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big bright mouth_; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple" — "Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere" — under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gap" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Don't lose heart if it's very difficult at times, everything will come out all right and nobody can in the beginning do as he wishes." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Women made civilization impossible with all their charm all their silliness." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The possible: that window of the dream opening upon reality. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent. (I.2.iv)" - Victor Hugo

"Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able bodied persons --- mostly women --- to do the dish-washing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work: that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper: of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children --- for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. The Jungle" - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"There is nothing like a coup de foudre and absorption in family responsibility for maturing the male and pulling his scattered wits together." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: 'Who knows how to make love stay?'" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air--moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh--felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"But this same day must end that work the ides of March begun; and whether we shall meet again I know not. Therefore our everlasting farewell take: forever, and forever, farewell, Cassius! If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; if not, why, then, this parting was well made. Julius Caesar, Act v, Scene 1" -

"Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him." - William Godwin

"The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years." - William Godwin

"Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Kiss me again, but don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer--but yours! How can I?" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force." - Emma Goldman

"Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king." - Emma Goldman

"Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began." - Emma Goldman

"I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

"Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that modernity is ending proclaim a postmodern age." - Felipe Fernández-Armesto

"To trust is good, not to trust is better." -

"The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilizations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane