Great Throughts Treasury

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

Mystery

"Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker." - William James

"Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results." - William James

"Great actions, the luster of which dazzles us, are represented by politicians as the effects of deep design; whereas they are commonly the effects of caprice and passion. Thus the war between Augustus and Antony, supposed to be owing to their ambition to give a master to the world, arose probably from jealousy." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"All people entrusted with office should attend equally to their duties. Their work may sometimes be interrupted due to illness or their being sent on missions. But whenever they are able to attend to business they should do so as if they knew what it was about and not obstruct public affairs on the grounds they are not personally familiar with them." - Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya

"So well thy words become thee as thy wounds." - William Shakespeare

"She lived, we'll say, a harmless life, she called a virtuous life, a quiet life, which was not life at all (But that she had not lived enough to know)" - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time." - Emil Nolde

"Sullen tempers are excited by the patience of their victims." - Émile Souvestre

"Lest Love should value less what loss would value more, had it the stricken privilege --- it cherishes before." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"We do not know the purpose of one moment of life." - Ezriel Tauber

"Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility." - Ernest Becker

"If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power­lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his sym­bolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one ac­cidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of ab­surdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?" - Ernest Becker

"To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life." - Ernest Becker

"We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available "spiritual space" is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower – by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalized in the economic calculus." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader." - Eudora Welty

"That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it." - Eugene Peterson

"It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Asked who was the worst president, he responded, Oh, there were so many of them. Certainly the silliest was Reagan. The most empty. [George H.W.] Bush is in the running for the worst." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"One enemy is too many, and a hundred friends are too few." - Italian Proverbs

"War makes robbers, and peace hangs them." - Italian Proverbs

"Who by himself can do anything, do not wait for others to do." - Italian Proverbs

"Pray not too often for great favors, for we stand most in need of small ones." - J. L. Balsford

"A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"I shall have to go. But- and here Frodo looked hard at Sam- if you really care about me, you will have to keep that DEAD secret. See? If you don't, if you even breathe a word of what you've heard here, then I hope Gandalf will turn you into a spotted toad and fill the garden full of grass snakes. Sam fell on his knees, trembling. Get up, Sam! Said Gandalf. I have thought of something better than that. Something to keep you quiet, and punish you properly for listening. You shall go away with Mr. Frodo! Me, sir! cried Sam, springing up like a dog invited for a walk. Me go and see Elves and all! Hooray! he shouted, and then burst into tears." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien