Great Throughts Treasury

"The real prize is never delivered by memory or by imagination, but by something above them." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"There is only one tyrant in life, which is a lack of understanding of life." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for." - Vicki Robin

"As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil." - Victor Hugo

"For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern." - Victor Hugo

"So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent." - Victor Hugo

"That history has to be re-made is evident. Up to the present time, it has been nearly always written from the miserable point of view of accomplished fact; it is time to write it from the point of view of principle." - Victor Hugo

"What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do." - Victor Hugo

"Which do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the slayer. Hurrah for Brutus! He slew. That's virtue. Virtue, but folly too...The Brutus who slew Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also designed that statue of an Amazon called the beautiful limbed, Euknemos, which Nero carried with him on his journeys. This Strongylion left nothing but two statues which put Brutus and Nero in harmony. Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other." - Victor Hugo

"The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"One definitely benefits by imparting knowledge to others." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"Humanity is in spiritual ignorance; people see things that do not exist." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"One, who wishes well of others and works for their welfare, quite naturally becomes the ruler of the masses." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"See yourselves in all; See all in yourselves; that is the road to lasting peace and joy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The past is 'truth' because events have already happened and they cannot be questioned." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The people, rulers, leaders and chiefs - none of them shall be able to remain in the world. Death is inevitable; it strikes the heads of the false." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"You may have huge hordes of men in the army; but they are useful only when the few Generals who lead them know where they are and whether they should proceed and how to overcome the enemy, whose strength and weakness they have comprehended. Hordes of people sing, recite, adore, worship, praise and prostrate, but these are the soldiers." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"It is as if many have again ignored the fact that an attack on the freedom of individuals threatens the freedom of all." - Václav Havel

"Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential." - Vannevar Bush

"Poverty cannot debase sturdy souls, nor riches lift up mean ones." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Appreciation, whether of nature, or books, or art, or men, depends very much on temperament. - What is beauty or genius or greatness to one, is far from being so to another." - Tryon Edwards

"Right actions in the future are the best explanations or apologies for wrong ones in the past; the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive." - Tryon Edwards

"Some persons are exaggerators by temperament. - They do not mean untruth, but their feelings are strong, and their imaginations vivid, so that their statements are largely discounted by those of calm judgment and cooler temperament. - They do not realize that "we always weaken what we exaggerate."" - Tryon Edwards

"There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other areas is going to shift to open-source communities." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away." - Thomas Love Peacock

"Genius is divine perseverance. Genius I cannot claim nor even extra brightness but perseverance all can have." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action. This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it." - Thucydides NULL

"They have discovered that the length of time we have now been in commission has rotted our ships and wasted our crews, and that with the completeness of our crews and the soundness of the pristine efficiency of our navy has departed. For it is impossible for us to haul our ships ashore and dry them out because the enemy's vessels being as many or more than our own, we are constantly anticipating an attack." - Thucydides NULL

"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries." - Thucydides NULL

"All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"Most centrist Democrats... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"It's a smile a girl could bring home to mother, if she had a mother; a smile a girl could pet like a pony, sip like a lemonade, hum like a popular tune; a smile a girl would feel safe with in a dark alley." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge, with Ate by his side come hot from hell, shall in these confines with a monarch's voice cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial." - William Shakespeare

"But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porpentine. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Ghost at I, v)" - William Shakespeare

"DOUGLAS: Now remains a sweet reversion— we may boldly spend, upon the hope of what is to come in. A comfort of retirement lives in this. HOTSPUR: A rendezvous, a home to fly unto. King Henry IV, Part I, Act iv, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error." - William Godwin

"There is at present in the world a cold reserve that keeps man at a distance from man. There is an art in the practice of which individuals communicate forever, without anyone telling his neighbor what estimate he forms of his attainments and character, how they ought to be employed, and how to be improved. There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of conversation, without the disclosure either of our feelings or opinions. The friend of justice will have no object more deeply at heart than the annihilation of this duplicity. The man whose heart overflows with kindness for his species will habituate himself to consider, in each successive occasion of social intercourse, how that occasion may be most beneficently improved. Among the topics to which he will be anxious to awaken attention, politics will occupy a principal share." - William Godwin

"A judgment is the mental act by which one thing is affirmed or denied of another." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Lord, for the erring thought not into evil wrought: Lord, for the wicked will betrayed and baffled still: For the heart from itself kept, Our thanksgiving accept." - William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters

"If you can change your mind, you can change your life." - William James

"The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one." - William James

"There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end." - William James

"To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time." - William James

"And the clouds fade above. Loved lips are thine as i tremble and hearken; bright thine eyes shine, though the leaves thy brow darken. O love, kiss me into silence, lest no word avail me, stay my head with thy bosom lest breath and life fail me! O sweet day, o rich day, made long for our love!" - William Morris