Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Men

"He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I heard them laugh. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep. It was not necessary to read any more. I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But i could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't! I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I was blown up while we were eating cheese." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends. 'The fish is my friend too,' he said aloud. 'I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Oh Daddy, canÂ’t you give her something to make her stop screaming? asked Nick. No. I havenÂ’t any anesthetic, his father said. But her screams are not important. I donÂ’t hear them because they are not important." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water'." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When two people love each other when they are happy and cheerful, and one of them or both work and do something really nice, they beckon as strongly as the lighthouse attracts migratory birds at night. If two men could be as solidly constructed as a lighthouse, would suffer only birds." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. The city had accommodated itself to winter, there was good wood for sale at the wood and coal place across our street, and there were braziers outside of many of the good cafes so that you could keep warm on the terraces. Our own apartment was warm and cheerful. We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful. Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh- washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg Gardens in the clear sharp wind. The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains blew in the bright light. All the distances were short now since we had been in the mountains. Because of the change in altitude I did not notice the grade of the hills except with pleasure, and the climb up to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure. The fireplace drew well in the room and it was warm and pleasant to work. I brought mandarins and roasted chestnuts to the room in paper packets and peeled and ate the small tangerine-like oranges and threw their skins and spat their seeds in the fire when I ate them and the roasted chestnuts when I was hungry. I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working. Up in the room I had a bottle of kirsch that we had brought back from the mountains and I took a drink of kirsch when I would get towards the end of a story or towards the end of the day's work. When I was through working for the day I put away the notebook, or the paper, in the drawer of the table and put any mandarines that were left in my pocket. They would freeze if they were left in the room at night. It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I 'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When you have a child, the world has a hostage." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Our universities produced lawyers and doctors for the old social system, but did not create enough agricultural extension teachers, agronomists, chemists, or physicists. In fact, we do not even have mathematicians." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall]." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution!" - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"When forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

"Ontogeny is a short and quick repetition, or recapitulation, of Phylogeny, determined by the laws of Inheritance and Adaptation." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

"The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

"Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?" - Ernst Toller

"In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others. It is not only unjust but also an irrational element which distorts all relationships within the enterprise." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"It might be said that energy is for the mechanical world what consciousness is for the human world. If energy fails, everything fails." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"We tend to think of development, not in terms of evolution, but in terms of creation." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is" - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"There are rational proofs by which we can know with certitude that God exists; but the certitude of faith, which is based on the infallibility of the word of God, is infinitely more reliable than all knowledge acquired by natural reason alone, no matter how evident it may be. In matters of revelation, error is absolutely impossible because the source of the knowledge of faith is God Himself, who is the Truth." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"And yet it is not always in our power to revive the perceptions we have felt. On some occasions the most we can do is by recalling to mind their names, to recollect some of the circumstances atr tending them, and an abstract idea of perception; an idea which we are capable of framing every instant, because we never think without being conscious of some perception which it depends on ourselves, to render genera)." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"When a man does not form connections, it is going to be the point considered, but a woman whom no one seems to have failed to attach any part." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy." - Eugene Peterson

"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"When men make gods, there is no God!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

"I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very we'll within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I do not oppose the insane asylum — but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"In this country — the most favored beneath the bending skies — we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child — and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…" - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Of course, Socialism is violently denounced by the capitalist press and by all the brood of subsidized contributors to magazine literature, but this only confirms the view that the advance of Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless wage-working slaves." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs