Great Throughts Treasury

"The wise man realistically accepts as part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them. He lives on the principle of “nothing attempted, nothing gained” and is resolved that if he fails he is going to fail while trying to succeed." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"Words of encouragement fan the spark of genius into the flame of achievement." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are "free" only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism." - Wilhelm Reich

"He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that’s because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word “radical.” His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government." - Wilhelm Reich

"I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life." - Wilhelm Reich

"Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!" - Wilhelm Reich

"Sexual anxiety is caused by the external frustration of instinctual gratification and is internally anchored by the fear of the dammed-up sexual excitation. This leads to orgasm anxiety, which is the ego's fear of the over-powering excitation of the genital system due to its estrangement from the experience of pleasure. Orgasm anxiety constitutes the core of the universal, biologically anchored pleasure anxiety. It is usually expressed as a general anxiety about every form of vegetative sensation and excitation, or the perception of such excitation and sensations. The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life." - Wilhelm Reich

"Now is the time for all good men to come to." - Walt Kelley, fully Walter Crawford "Walt" Kelly, Jr.

"Have you surpassed the rest? Are you the president? It doesn't matter. They will more than arrive there, every one, and still pass on." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"I swear I think there is nothing but immortality. That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it! And all preparation is for it – and identity for it – and life and materials are all together for it." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"After we have done our best work and vigorously pursued our most passionate modes of reading, the text—and the God featured in the text— remain inscrutable and undomesticated. Partly the reason for that inscrutability and lack of domestication is that the text in its final form is complex and pluralistic, hosting a variety of traditioning and interpreting voices that become normative traditions. More than that, however, the inscrutability and lack of domestication in the text are a consequences of the God attested in these pages who is Holy Other." - Walter Brueggemann

"What a commission it is to speak a future that none think imaginable! Of course that cannot be done by inventing new symbols for that is wishful thinking. Rather it means to move back into the deepest memories of this community and activate those very symbols that have always been the very basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness. Therefore the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. And when the prophet returns with the community to those deep symbols they will discern that hope is not a late tacked on hypothesis to serve a crisis but rather the primal dimension of every memory of this community. The memory of this community begins in God's promissory address to the darkness of chaos, to barren Sarah, and to oppressed Egyptian slaves. The speech of God is first about an alternative future." - Walter Brueggemann

"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign." - Walter Lippmann

"That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

"Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie--labor is fighting for a larger pie." - Walter Reuther, fully Walter Philip Reuther

"By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"The grapholect bears the marks of the millions of minds which have used it to share their consciousnesses with one another. Into it has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Webster's Third New World Dictionary (1971) states in its Preface that it could have included "many times" more than the 450,000 words it does include. Assuming that "many times" must mean at least three times, and rounding out the figures, we can understand that the editors have on hand a record of some million and a half words used in print in English. Oral languages and oral dialects can get along with perhaps five thousand words or less." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage - leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"Let us live gladly! Quite certainly we are free to do it. Perhaps it is our only freedom, but ours it is, and it is only phenomenally a freedom. "Living free" is being "as one is." Can we not do it now? Indeed can we not-do-it? It is not even a "doing": It is beyond doing and not-doing. It is being as-we-are." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations." - Wendell Berry

"The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied." - Wendell Berry

"We do not need to plan or devise a world of the future; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid futurology available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at the future of the human race; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children." - Wendell Berry

"I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn, those to whom evil is done do evil in return." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Wife: Why don't you go to bed? WC: I thought I'd take a nap first." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked - who is good? Not that men are ignorant - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The principle that where there is fear, there will be wrong figures." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

"That's the down-town frieze, principally the church steeple, a black line beside a white line; and the stack of the electric plant, a black line drawn on flat air." - Wallace Stevens

"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind." - Wallace Stevens

"Preservation of the special character of nations is essential for progress." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky

"All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step — the search after forms of the transition or the approach to the proletarian revolution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Destroy the family, you destroy the country." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The Poor Peasants’ Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants. But between the kulaks, who are a small minority, and the poor or semi-proletarians there is the section of the middle peasants. The Soviet government has never declared or conducted any struggle against them. Any steps or measures to the contrary must be condemned most vigorously and stopped. The socialist government must pursue a policy of agreement with the middle peasants." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade -- demons placed there only to show they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Compassion does not manifest itself when we live on the surface of existence, when we try to piece together a comfortable life out of easily available fragments. Compassion requires a plunge to the depths of life—where oneness is reality and divisions merely an illusion. If we dwell at the superficial layers of being, we’ll be overly conscious of the apparent differences in human beings on the physical and mental level, and of the superficial difference in cultures and behavior. If we penetrate to the essentials, however, we will discover that there is nothing fundamental that differentiates any human being from another, or any human being from any other living creature. All are manifestations of life, created with the same life principles and nurtured by the same life-support systems. Oneness is absolute reality; differentiation has only transitory, relative reality." - Vimala Thakar

"The observation of the breathing rhythm is suggested as a support to those who cannot arrive at the spontaneous stillness of total mind without some support. But to depend upon the support for a long period is undesirable and unwarranted. One has to discover for oneself whether one is learning self-reliance through the support or not. Simple observation of the breathing rhythm culminates into silence or total awareness within a few weeks. Secondly the hour of silence should enable one to live in awareness throughout the day." - Vimala Thakar

"We have accepted the watertight compartments of society, the fragmentation of living as factual and necessary. We live in relationship to these fragments and accept the internalized divisions—the various roles we play, the contradictory value systems, the opposing motives and priorities—as reality. We are at odds with ourselves internally; we believe that the inner is fundamentally different from the outer, that what is me is quite separate from the not-me, that divisions among people and nations are necessary, and yet we wonder why there are tensions, conflicts, wars in the world. The conflicts begin with minds that believe in fragmentation and are ignorant of wholeness." - Vimala Thakar

"In painting I want to say something comforting in the way that music is comforting." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Even the most seemingly materialistic daydreams - the transformed life we imagine in a new dress, a new car, a new house - allow us to rise above the here and now, projecting ourselves into an idealized future. In the process, we learn truths about who we are, what we desire, and who we might become. Those things may matter only to our minds, but that doesn't make them any less valuable or any less real." - Virginia Postrel

"A growing body of clinical observation has pointed to the conclusion that the family therapy must be oriented to the family as a whole." - Virginia Satir

"As a therapist, I am a companion. I try to help people tune into their own wisdom." - Virginia Satir

"A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale. Thus it is no great wonder if, as she pitted one sex against the other, and found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not sure to which she belonged…." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf