Great Throughts Treasury

"You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker." - Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington

"O, call back yesterday, did time return, And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men! To-day, to-day, unhappy day too late, O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state; For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead, Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispersed, and fled." - William Shakespeare

"One will of mine to make thy large Will more." - William Shakespeare

"Our courteous Antony, whom ne'er the word of 'no' woman heard speak, being barbered ten times o'er, goes to the feast, and for his ordinary pays his heart for what his eyes eat only." - William Shakespeare

"POLONIUS: My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently. HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? POLONIUS: By th'mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed. HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel. POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel. HAMLET: Or like a whale? POLONIUS: Very like a whale. HAMLET: Then I will come to my mother by and by. - They fool me to the top of my bent. - I will come by and by." - William Shakespeare

"Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life and the labors of life reduce themselves." - Edwin Way Teale

"Finding Love changes us. Who is out to find Love, matures along the way. The moment to go looking for love, you're going to change from the inside out." - Elif Safak

"I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My guru says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it..." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"And when a woman says she loves a man, the man must hear her, though he love her not." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Of writing many books there is no end; and I who have written much in prose and verse for others' uses, will write now for mine,— will write my story for my better self, as when you paint your portrait for a friend, who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it long after he has ceased to love you, just to hold together what he was and is." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"The place is all awave with trees, limes, myrtles, purple-beaded, acacias having drunk the lees of the night-dew, fain headed, and wan, grey olive-woods, which seem the fittest foliage for a dream." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"With tears and laughter for all time!" - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"You cannot prove to yourself that you love God by examining your feelings toward Him. They are indefinite and they fluctuate. But just as far as you obey Him, just so far, depend upon it; you love Him. It is not natural to us sinful, ungrateful beings to prefer His pleasure to our own or to follow His way instead of our own way, and nothing, nothing but love of Him can or does make us obedient to Him." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"This instinct for totality, the counterpart of the feeling, gnawing and rankling, of dissatisfaction, is the germ of all religion. But man answers the craving need of a totality and a prospect into the future according to his historical conditions. Therefore all religions are genuine rings. None of them is a counterfeit, and none of them owns exclusively the truth and the whole truth." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

"Painting is nature seen through a temperament." - Emile Zola

"Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light. When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you’re lagging, I may remember him!" - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Only two pointed arrows betrayal of violence is similar to injure users of worse enemies." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Why are atoms so small?... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"I distinguish therefore two sorts of perceptions among those we are conscious of; some which we remember at least the moment. After others which we forget the very moment they are impressed. This distinction is founded on the experience just now given. A person highly entertained at a play shall remember perfectly the impression made on him by a very moving scene, though he may forget how he was affected by the rest of the entertainment." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Our wants are all dependent upon one another, and the perceptions of them might be considered as a series of fundamental ideas, to which we. might reduce all those which make a part of our knowledge." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"The progress of the operations, whose analysis and origin have been here explained, is obvious. At first, there is only a simple perception in the mind, which is no more than the impression it receives from external objects." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"These suppositions admitted; in order to recollect the familiar ideas, it would be sufficient to be capable of giving attention to some of our fundamental ideas, with which they are connected. Now this is always feasible; because, so long as we are awake, there is not an instant in which our constitution, our passions, and our situation, do not occasion some of those perceptions which I call fundamental." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Thus the most natural order of ideas required, that the government should precede the verb: they said, for example, fruit to want." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"What we have been saying in regard to imagination and memory, must be applied to contemplation, according as it is referred to either. If it be made to consist in retaining the perceptions; before the use of instituted signs it has only a habit which does not depend on us: but it has none at all, if it be made to consist in preserving the signs themselves." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love? Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"The inspiration often seems like a tarantula bite him, shake him from sleep atavistic and in those moments it is impossible to write better than him, with far more cunning, with the most perfect taste." - Eugenio Montale

"He is not a lover who does not love for ever." - Euripedes NULL

"My hearing is out of the ordinary as others might see it, but not for me. I'm used to my hearing in the same way that I'm used to the size of my hands." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie

"All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"The book should be a ball of light in one's hand." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"The fact that there is a spiritual power in us, that is to say, a power which testifies to the unity of our life with the life of others, which impels us to regard others as other selves — this fact conies home to us even more forcibly in sorrow than in joy. It is thrown into clearest relief on the background of pain. In the glow of achievement we are apt to be full of a false self-importance. But in moments of weakness we realize, through contrast, the infinitely superior strength of the power whose very humble organs and ministers we are. It is then we come to understand that, isolated from it, we are nothing; at one with it, identified with it, we participate in its eternal nature, in its resistless course." - Felix Adler

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes." - Gustave Flaubert

"I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty and the democratic form is as bad as any of the other forms." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken