Great Throughts Treasury

"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity--even under the most difficult circumstances--to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Humans should always speak truth and should be committed towards it. Such a person is always immortal." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"In real worship, we just not do ritualistic worship but we try to imbibe the qualities of the one we are worshipping." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"Every moving thing I have held fast. Eye and breath I have held fast. I have held fast all limbs in the deep gloom of the night." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"In order to be blessed with a long life it is imperative that we become strong both mentally and physically. We should do all that makes our mind and body healthy and energetic." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"In peace and poise, they remain detached; in peace and poise, they laugh. In peace and poise, they remain silent; in peace and poise, they chant." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Our heart should be full of compassion and free from negative qualities like hatred, hostility and jealousy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"There is in life the tragedy of ignorance and selfishness. They force man to take the wrong road; and suffer calamity." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"We speak to being, to the lord of being, and also to him that controls the beings; to the beings all assembled, they shall deliver us from calamity." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"A new burst of rage swept over him — What did it matter whether it was true or not — whether anything was true or not? What did it matter if anybody had done all the hideous and loathsome things that everybody else said they had done? It was what everybody was saying! It was what everybody believed — what everybody was interested in! It was the measure of a whole society — their ideals and their standards! It was the way they spent their time, repeating nasty scandals about each other; living in an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, with endless whispering and leering, and gossip of low intrigue." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"Belief is the wound that knowledge heals." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Sci-fi uses the images that ‘sf’ — starting with H.G. Wells — made familiar: space travel, aliens, galactic wars and federations, time machines, et cetera, taking them literally, not caring if they are possible or even plausible. It has no interest in or relation to real science or technology. It's fantasy in space suits. Spectacle. Wizards with lasers. Kids with ray guns. I've written both, but I have to say I respect science fiction enough that I wince when people call it sci-fi." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance." - Václav Havel

"Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt." - Václav Havel

"We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality." - Václav Havel

"What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper." - Václav Havel

"You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it." - Václav Havel

"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk." - Vannevar Bush

"The needs of business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced." - Vannevar Bush

"If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"In order to protect himself from force, man was obliged to submit to justice. Justice or force: he was compelled to choose between the two masters, so little are we made to be independent." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Indolence is the sleep of the mind." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Women and young people develop their separate estimates of their tastes." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"You must rouse into people's consciousness their own prudence and strength, if you want to raise their character." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Although the Buddhadharma has not perished, the Sangha itself has. Morality and virtue should be cultivated, but are not. The honest and sincere ones invite ridicule, While the false and scheming ones enjoy praise. In the world of the five turbidities, pure people are rare. Living beings never awaken from the three kinds of intoxication.I have some earnest words of exhortation for the young generation of the Sangha: The revival of our religion depends on you Bhikshus." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

"The dumb transmit to the dumb, one is teaching but neither has any idea. The sifu goes to hell. Where will the student end up?" - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

"True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us." - Tryon Edwards

"Do good and throw it into the sea; if the fish know it not, the Lord will." - Turkish Proverbs

"The fool sings a love song to his wife, the wise man will talk about his dog." - Turkish Proverbs

"Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people." - Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

"In the hyperconnected world, there is only good better and best," - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do..." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"The last fruit of holy obedience is the simplicity of the trusting child, the simplicity of the children of God. It is the simplicity which lies beyond complexity. It is the naiveté which is the yonder side of sophistication. It is the beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age of religious busy-ness for the Kingdom of God—yet how many are caught, and arrested in development, within this adolescent development of the soul's growth! The mark of this simplified life is radiant joy. It lives in the Fellowship of the Transfigured Face. Knowing sorrow to the depths it does not agonize and fret and strain, but in serene, unhurried calm it walks in time with the joy and assurance of Eternity. Knowing fully the complexity of men's problems it cuts through to the Love of God and ever cleaves to Him. Like the mercy of Shakespeare, "'tis mightiest in the mightiest." But it binds all obedient souls together in the fellowship of humility and simple adoration of Him who is all in all." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"What the psychiatrist calls a “delusion of persecution” is one of the most dramatic human defenses against the feeling of personal insignificance and worthlessness. In fact, no one cares a hoot about Jones. He is an extra on the stage of life. But he wants to be a star." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz

"We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing" - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action... So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset." - Thucydides NULL

"There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it's possible, and invest their whole selves in that." - Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren

"He who goes no further than bare justice, stops at the beginning of virtue." - Hugh Blair

"Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you? It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"As fresh as morning dew distill'd on flowers." - William Shakespeare

"At this Adonis smiles as in disdain, that in each cheek appears a pretty dimple. Love made those hollows, if himself were slain, he might be buried in a tomb so simple; foreknowing well, if there he came to lie, why, there Love lived, and there he could not die. Venus and Adonis" - William Shakespeare