Great Throughts Treasury

"The most remarkable fact about the alphabet no doubt is that it was invented only once. It was worked up by a Semitic people or Semitic peoples around the year 1500 BC, in the same general geographic area where the first of all scripts appeared, the cuneiform, but two millennia later than the cuneiform. Every alphabet in the worldderives in one way or another from the original Semitic development." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Soon, O Lanthe! life is o'er, and sooner beauty's heavenly smile: grant only (and I ask no more), let love remain that little while." - Walter Savage Landor

"Once you recognize, or admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"This combination virtually assures both Berkshire and General Re shareholders that they will have a better future than if the two companies operated separately," - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"The easiest thing to do, whenever you fail, is to put yourself down by blaming your lack of ability for your misfortunes." - Washington Irving

"Each person must decide for himself what he wants each day. As a leader, I will expose you to the options and the likely consequences of those options. I'll even share my opinion if asked, but I'll never confuse it with the opinion, which simply doesn't exist." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"If I am here, everyone is here. If I am not here, no one is here." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The you that is beyond form is eternal and alive in a formless world." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"When you have a vision and you act as if that vision were already here, you create not only the necessary expertise, but you literally become your own miracle worker. If you believe that you could never head up such an undertaking because ‘you don’t have the necessary training, credentials, experience,’ or whatever, then that is what you will act upon. Begin to act as if you were that expert, even if you have to fool yourself in the beginning. If you have enough belief in yourself, and you are ready, the teacher will appear and you will plunge right in and create the credential that you need to get the job completed." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"In the West reintegration was sporadic, but in recent years it has become a widespread preoccupation. Unfortunately its technical dependence on oriental literature - sometimes translated by scholars whose knowledge of the language was greater than their understanding of the subject - has proved a barrier which rendered full comprehension laborious and exceedingly long. Therefore it appears to be essential that such teaching as may be transmissible shall be given in a modern idiom and in accordance with our own processes of thought. But this presentation can never be given by the discursive method to which we are used for the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, for the understanding required is not conceptual and therefore is not knowledge." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"It is not for us to search but to remain still, to achieve Immobility not Action." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"Pack your bags, go to the station without them, catch the train, and leave your self behind." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers." - Wendell Berry

"I’ve come down from the sky like some damned ghost, delayed too long…To the abandoned fields the trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes to them, time goes, the trees stand; the only place they go is where they are. Those wholly patient ones… They do no wrong, and they are beautiful. What more Could we have thought to ask?... I stand and wait for light to open the dark night. I stand and wait for prayer to come and find me here." - Wendell Berry

"If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared." - Wendell Berry

"In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I don’t think anybody believed it. I still don’t think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at. By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they had signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best. The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish." - Wendell Berry

"Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution. It is the only way by which we can cease to look to war for peace. ... Peaceableness is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and practicable method, it is nothing. As a practicable method, it reduces helplessness in the face of conflict. In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one." - Wendell Berry

"The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community is married, realizes it’s essential unity, in each of its marriages... Marital fidelity, that is, involves the public or institutional as well as the private aspect of marriage. One is married to marriage as well as to one's spouse. But one is married also to something vital of one's own that does not exist before the marriage: one's given word. It now seems to me that the modern misunderstanding of marriage involves a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of the seriousness of giving one's word, and of the dangers of breaking it once it is given. Adultery and divorce now must be looked upon as instances of that disease of word-breaking, which our age justifies as realistic or practical or necessary, but which is tattering the invariably single fabric of speech and trust." - Wendell Berry

"Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place." - Wendell Berry

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is in. In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand." - Wendell Berry

"A million eyes, a million boots in line, without expression, waiting for a sign." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"In poetry you have a form looking for a subject and a subject looking for a form. When they come together successfully you have a poem." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The other facet that I am particularly interested in at this staging, is the shift from the old priest/priestess model, which is the individual who, for whatever reason, has found the pathway in, and then returns and, essentially, guides a gathering of people and spends the rest of his or her life doing that – where the individuals are not really brought into the ability to guide, they’re really the recipient of a divine image. And that’s essentially what has been played out for thousands of years. I feel what is, transpiring at this point is what this work is all based in. Which is that individuals are being brought into the ability to tap the resource individually and will be endowed, endowed individually so that when we come together it’s no longer the process of the have and have-nots. It now is a gathering of individuals who know how to find the inner center and when they come to join with others, they’re ready to share those resources in…in a wonderful sense of human camaraderie and, and enjoyment of gathering rather than the idea of taking an inspiration from an inspired one. And there is the process of the mystery training, which a lot of this work is, which is preparing you for such a possibility. So although I am using an old model (which is the teaching model) my intent is to bring you to the bridge from which you will self-discover. You will come to a unique experience of the divine mystery. And when we gather, one is awed by the range in which the mystery reveals itself – very creative and very I find…inspiring. And I believe this is the difference between the Piscean Age and the Aquarian Age that we’re embarking on. Ah…wonderful form prior to, which is One serving the Many. In the next phase the Many serve the One. Which is the Many serve the One inside." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"No matter how carefully you plan your goals they will never be more than pipe dreams unless you pursue them with gusto." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone

"But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"When men have appreciated the countless differences which the exercise of that judgment must necessarily produce, when they have estimated the intrinsic fallibility of their reason, and the degree in which it is distorted by the will, when, above all, they have acquired that love of truth which a constant appeal to private judgment at last produces, they will never dream that guilt can be associated with an honest conclusion, or that one class of arguments should be stifled by authority." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"As a single atom, man is an enigma: as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent: as a species, the offspring of necessity. The unity of the universe is a scientific fact. To assert that it is the operation of a single Mind is a conjecture based on analogy, and analogy may be a deceptive guide." - W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

"All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function." - Walker Percy

"Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)" - Walker Percy

"That singularity is language." - Walker Percy

"The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to." - Walker Percy

"There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you." - Walker Percy

"I know my lazy, leaden twang is like the reason in a storm; and yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there." - Wallace Stevens

"The idols have seen lots of poverty, snakes and gold and lice, but not the truth." - Wallace Stevens

"The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself. The moonlight seemed to." - Wallace Stevens

"There comes a time when the waltz is no longer a mode of desire, a mode of revealing desire and is empty of shadows. Too many waltzes have ended." - Wallace Stevens

"What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?" - Wallace Stevens

"It is no secret that the moon has no light of her own, but is, as it were, a mirror, receiving brightness from the influence of the sun." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult—and far more precious—to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin