Great Throughts Treasury

"I can do what I want, but the trouble is that I do not quite know what to do." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"If I am not for myself the right to life, which has given the company?" - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"My tendency is to believe that all experience is an enrichment instead of an impoverishment." - Eudora Welty

"I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready." - Eugenio Montale

"Security is elusive. ItÂ’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure." -

"When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us." -

"Give it a kick at the right place and it'll work." - Ezer Weizman

"One good yardstick as to whether a person might be the right one for you is this: in her presence, do you think your noblest thoughts, do you aspire to your finest deeds, do you wish you were better than you are?" - Ezra Taft Benson

"We honor these partners [friends outside the Church] because their devotion to correct principles overshadowed their devotion to popularity, party, or personalities. We honor our founding fathers of this republic for the same reason. God raised up these patriotic partners to perform their mission, and he called them “wise men.” The First Presidency acknowledged that wisdom when they gave us the guideline a few years ago of supporting political candidates “who are truly dedicated to the Constitution in the tradition of our Founding Fathers.”. . . Our wise founders seemed to understand, better than most of us, our own scripture, which states that “it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority . . . they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” To help prevent this, the founders knew that our elected leaders should be bound by certain fixed principles. Said Thomas Jefferson: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” These wise founders, our patriotic partners, seemed to appreciate more than most of us the blessings of the boundaries that the Lord set within the Constitution, for he said, “And as pertaining to law of man, whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil.” In God the founders trusted, and in his Constitution — not in the arm of flesh. “O Lord,” said Nephi, “I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; . . . cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm.”" - Ezra Taft Benson

"The consolations of the moral ideal are vigorous. They do not encourage idle sentiment. They recommend to the sufferer action. Our loss, indeed, will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or storied marble tomb. The criterion of all right relations whatsoever is that we are helped by them. And so, too, the criterion of right relations to the dead is that we are helped, not weakened and disabled, by them." - Felix Adler

"The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon." - Felix Adler

"Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful." - Gustave Flaubert

"Who is in fear of every leaf must not go into the wood." - Italian Proverbs

"A small oversight, but it proved fatal. Small oversights often do." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien