Great Throughts Treasury

"The Peace of Wild Things - 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." - Wendell Berry

"The world is whole beyond human knowing." - Wendell Berry

"It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Learn from your dreams what you lack." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Marriage is rarely bliss but, surely it would be worse as particles to pelt at thousands of miles per sec about a universe in which a lover's kiss would either not be felt or break the loved one's neck." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Warm are the still and lucky miles, white shores of longing stretch away, a light of recognition fills the whole great day, and bright the tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, now greenly falls the learned shade across the sleeping brows and stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne on seas of shipwreck home at last: see! In a fire of praising burns the dry dumb past, and we our life-day long shall part no more." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Children learn more from what you are than what you teach." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in public schools. It seems to me that this is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma. If questioned they will usually resort to double-talk before admitting the fact. But who today actually believes that this world is ruled and directed by a benevolent person of great power who, on humble appeal, will change the course of events at our request? Who believes in miracles? Many folk follow religious ceremonies and services and allow their children to learn fairy tales and so-called religious truth, which in time the children come to recognize as conventional lies told by their parents and teachers for the children's good. One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of the custom. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"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

"How strange to think that you cannot pass along the discovery." - Walker Percy

"The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the Ring Nebula in Lyra. It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos." - Walker Percy

"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

"The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver." - Walker Percy

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy

"What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning." - Walker Percy

"Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature? Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?" - Walker Percy

"And yet what good were yesterday's devotions? I affirm and then at midnight the great cat leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone." - Wallace Stevens

"God and the imagination are one." - Wallace Stevens

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." - Wallace Stevens

"The poem refreshes life so that we share, for a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies belief in an immaculate beginning and sends us, winged by an unconscious will, to an immaculate end. We move between these points: from that ever-early candor to its late plural." - Wallace Stevens

"When I think of our lands I think of the house and the table that holds a platter of pears, vermilion smeared over green, arranged for show." - Wallace Stevens

"And the rest is rust and stardust." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise?" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Now I remember, when she was a child, were in fashion - oh, not only children, but also adults, such things were called Netcom - and they were supposed to, then a special mirror, little Curves - is distorted, nothing can be understood, failure, confusion, all the slides in the eyes, but its curvature was a reason, but just because I have brought ... Or, rather, to its curvature were chosen so ... No, wait, I did not explain. In short, you had such a wild here mirror and a collection of different netok, that is absolutely ridiculous things: any such shapeless, mottled, in holes, in spots, ryabye, knobby things, like some resources, but a mirror that ordinary objects is distorted now, so get real food, that is, when you're so weird and ugly object placed so that it is reflected in a strange and ugly mirror turned out great, not on there made ??it so, all restored, all was well, - and that of formless pestryad was obtained in a mirror image of the lovely slender flowers, craft, figure, some landscape. Could - in order - even your own portrait, that is, you were given some hideous mess, and it was you, but you had the key to the mirror. Ah, I remember when it was fun and a little scary - what if it will not work! - To take the hand that's such a new obscure Netcom and zoom to the mirror, and see in it, as your hand is completely decomposed, but how pointless Netcom develops into a beautiful picture, clear, clear." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middleclass nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"We shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life." - Vimala Thakar

"Traditionally, there have been two separate approaches. One approach takes us toward the social, the economic, the political problems, and says, “Look here, unless the economic and political problems are solved, there will be no happiness and no peace, there will be no end to suffering. It is the responsibility of every individual to engage in solving these problems according to some ideology. Turning toward the inner life, the imbalances and impurities of the inner life, that is not so important, that can be taken care of later on, for it is a self-centered, egoistic activity. But the responsibility is toward the society, toward the human race, so keep aside all those problems of meditation and silence, inner sophistication, transformation for inner revolution—keep all that aside. First turn toward this.” And the other approach says, “The political and economic problems cannot be solved unless the individual is transformed totally. Be concerned with your psychological mutation, the inner, radical revolution. The political, the economic, the social problems can wait.”" - Vimala Thakar

"Now it so happens in the world that opposed to characters of such persons as he there are characters like mine, for instance. I care as little for the world's opinion as that man cared for what was right. To appear right was enough for him; what I th" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the color of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns — what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I'm looking for facts first, but it was probably caused by extra water in the hull, ... I think people are not aware the dangers of a boat's wake." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"Living from the outer to the inner; that means that you have roving eyes and alert ears to look out at the panorama of society and wonder and hope and contrive to try to get something from the outer that will satisfy the inner." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Realize that truth disturbs in order to cure." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard