Great Throughts Treasury

"Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants." - William Congreve

"Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure, Married in haste, we may repent at leisure." - William Congreve

"What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void the world can never fill." - William Cowper

"I make a living off (politicians), so I can't knock 'em. Every time we elect some fellow we think he's terrible and then when we get another one in he's worse. So, I am always in favor of keeping the one we've got and let the other go." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible." - Wilhelm Reich

"Life springs from thousands of sources vibrant, hands up everyone who cling to, refuses to be expressed in phrases tedious, only accepts actions transparent, truthful words of love and pleasure" - Wilhelm Reich

"Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently." - Wilhelm Reich

"You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it." - Wilhelm Reich

"It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet." - Washington Irving

"There are moments of mingled sorrow and tenderness, which hallow the caresses of affection." - Washington Irving

"Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The master of all work is in its practice." - Welsh Proverbs

"Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy." - Wendell Berry

"The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life." - Wendell Berry

"What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest." - Wendell Berry

"The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy

"As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible." - Wallace Stevens

"I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies—cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don't think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come upon some young officers debauching some girls, said to them angrily: Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I am an artist... It's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, 'I know all about it. I've already found it.' As far as I'm concerned, the word means, 'I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved.'" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"To look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"I regard (parenting) as the hardest, most complicated, anxiety-ridden, sweat-and-blood-producing job in the world. Succeeding requires the ultimate in patience, common sense, commitment, humor, tact, love, wisdom, awareness, and knowledge. At the same time, it holds the possibility for the most rewarding, joyous experience of a lifetime, namely, that of being successful guides to a new and unique human being." - Virginia Satir

"It is harder to kill a phantom than a reality." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Her mind was like a spring-tide in full flood; rich, shining, vigorous, and capable of infinite variety." - Vera Mary Brittain

"Meaning is different from explanation and it certainly isn’t blame (no shame no blame really helps with seeing clearly, no?) I asked, “What is the cancer trying to tell me?” What is the story of this tumor? How does it fit into the narrative of my life?” The cancer seemed sweet to me. Well meaning. It was trying to hold all the undigested feelings and experiences I had raced right past in my headstrong, headlong race to save the world. She (the tumor felt like a little girl) became beloved. I owned her as my creation – not as my fault but as my perfectly crafted, unconscious, possibly deadly solution to the complex equation of my life. In one bundle it took on the world’s toxicity and my own reaction to it." - Vicki Robin

"The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them." - Victor Hugo

"With regard to the duration of human life, there does not appear to have existed from the earliest ages of the world to the present moment the smallest permanent symptom or indication of increasing prolongation." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!" - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV

"When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness." - William James

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem short. Othello the Moor of Venice (Iago at II, iii)" - William Shakespeare

"To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner." - Eleanora Duse, aka Duse

"Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found, a love that makes breath poor and speech unable." - William Shakespeare

"But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life… what happened was that I started to pray." - 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

"It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Maybe this is just some stupid romantic South American idea, but I need you to understand-darling, for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let's enjoy this time. It's marvelous. Felipe-Eat, Pray, Love" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: 'Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"All through the centuries, scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton