Great Throughts Treasury

"Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees." - Edwin Way Teale

"Such it is as are those dulcet sounds in break of day that creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear and summon him to marriage." -

"The other day in prayer I said to God, Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It was not death, for I stood up, and all the dead lie down; it was not night, for all the bells put out their tongues, for noon. It was not frost, for on my flesh I felt siroccos crawl, nor fire, for just my marble feet could keep a chancel cool. And yet it tasted like them all; the figures I have seen set orderly, for burial, reminded me of mine, as if my life were shaven and fitted to a frame, and could not breathe without a key; and I was like midnight, some, when everything that ticked has stopped, and space stares, all around, or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, repeal the beating ground. But most like chaos,--stopless, cool, without a chance or spar,-- or even a report of land to justify despair." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It is better to give than lend and costs just about the same." - Evan Esar

"Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly