Great Throughts Treasury

"I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life." - Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson

"Mother, I cannot mind my wheel; my fingers ache, my lips are dry:" - Walter Savage Landor

"Before we find good alternatives for bear bile, we do not have a timetable to eliminate the practice (extracting bile from the gallbladder of farmed bears)." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?" - Wayne Muller

"The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha—tranquility, peace, and repose—rest, in the deeper possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete." - Wayne Muller

"To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body, but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"We are Beings, in a school for Gods, learning in slow motion, the consequences of thought." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide." - Walker Percy

"In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"She wants to go home, but nobodys home. That's why she lies, broken inside. With no place to go, no place to go, to dry her eyes, broken inside..." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures." - Vimala Thakar

"A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"For pleasure has no relish unless we share it." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence." - Vera Mary Brittain

"Thus all things are doomed to change for the worse and retrograde." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"God is behind any and all efforts that a human being makes toward him." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"He looked like a caryatid on vacation; he was supporting nothing but his daydreams." - Victor Hugo

"Those, who are successful and prosperous earn respect of the people. One should therefore strive tirelessly to earn wealth so that success and good status follows up naturally." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"We have all around us, in the atmosphere, the music emanating from all the Broadcasting Stations of the World, but they do not assail your ear at any time. You are not aware of any Station; but, if you have a receiver and if you tune it to the correct wavelength, you can hear the matter broadcast from any Station; if you fail to tune it correctly, you will get instead of news only nuisance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Herbs (medicines),while descending down from heaven to earth proclaimed those who eat us, are never destroyed." - Yajur Veda, or Yajurveda

"I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J.A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, am now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Los Lobos river, and sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and 'Bunny' is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"The tricks of illusion came to him so easily that it seemed he had been born knowing them and needed only to be reminded." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"The unknown, said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?" - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"An emmet may work its heart out, but can never make honey." - Turkish Proverbs

"Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”… In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims. Now its focus, and the Obama team’s focus, should be on creating a clear choice for Hamas for the world to see: Are you about destroying Israel or building Gaza?" - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"This amazing simplification comes when we "center down," when life is lived with singleness of eye, from a holy Center where the breath and stillness of Eternity are heavy upon us and we are wholly yielded to Him. Some of you know this holy, recreating Center of eternal peace and joy and live in it day and night. Some of you may see it over the margin and wistfully long to slip into that amazing Center where the soul is at home with God. Be very faithful to that wistful longing. It is the Eternal Goodness calling you to return Home, to feed upon green pastures and walk beside still waters and live in the peace of the Shepherd's presence. It is the life beyond fevered strain. We are called beyond strain, to peace and power and joy and love and thorough abandonment of self. We are called to put our hands trustingly in His hand and walk the holy way, in no anxiety assuredly resting in Him." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"She would never exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others." - Tillie Olsen

"A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"Conscience is too great a power in the nature of man to be altogether subdued: it may for a time be repressed and kept dormant; but conjectures there are in human life which awaken it; and when once re-awakened, it flashes on the sinner’s mind with all the horrors of an invisible ruler and a future judgment." - Hugh Blair

"Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying." - Tom Butler-Bowdon

"Beauty itself doth of itself persuade, the eyes of men without an orator. The Rape of Lucrece" - William Shakespeare

"But heaven hath a hand in these events; to whose high will we bound our calm contents. King Richard II, Act v, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"Magic is the total delight in chance. " - Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior ." - William James

"Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom." - William James

"There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers." - William James

"Ah! Wilt thou leave me then without one kiss, to slay the very seeds of fear and doubt," - William Morris

"Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed." - William Morris

"Cricket, following the Ashes success, has proven to be one of the major drivers of inbound tourism in the sports and leisure sector." - William Morris