Great Throughts Treasury

"How could a king who should rule over all people and all things in the country with impartiality treat those of low birth any differently from the way he treats others?" - Sejong the Great, aka King Sejong, family name Yi, given name Do NULL

"Leading a sheltered existence inside a palace, I am not aware of all the going-ons among the people. If there are any matters that cause anguish to the people, you should report them to me without failing." - Sejong the Great, aka King Sejong, family name Yi, given name Do NULL

"Unlike many other occupations, scholars have the greatest responsibility to the people. Their work can ultimately improve the lives of all people for many decades. But if an academic becomes lost in his study, he cannot see how his work can benefit others. Therefore, like a well-balanced fencing stance, or a reasonable argument, the scholar’s life must be even and balanced." - Sejong the Great, aka King Sejong, family name Yi, given name Do NULL

"When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the people of Tibet will be scattered like ants across the world and the dharma will come to the land of the red man." - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"When the moment is upon me may I not be frightened by the collection of peaceful and wrathful aspects: emanations of my own mind. When I am in the bardo of birth till death, may I waste no time; abandoning laziness, may I engage without distraction in the study, assimilation of and meditation on the teachings, may I practice, integrating the path appearance and mind." - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"Historically, there had been many periods of Chinese Renaissance." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

"Conservatism is a very good thing; but how many conservatives announce principles which might have shocked Dick Turpin, or nonsensicalities flat enough to have raised contempt in Jerry Sneak!" - Edwin Percy Whipple

"The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings, were to rule the world; and weapons, forged in the mind, keen-edged and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle-ax." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation." - Edwin Way Teale

"A beautiful thing is never perfect." - Egyptian Proverbs

"If you search for the laws of harmony, you will find knowledge." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Seeing someone else’s problems makes your own problems seem smaller." - Egyptian Proverbs

"What is still hidden is more than what has happened/been revealed so far." - Egyptian Proverbs

"When the angels appear, the devils run away." - Egyptian Proverbs

"You speak reason yet you do weird stuff that contradicts it." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Through the years of my trance communications and research, two control personalities... have always been identified with my work, and they have never ceased to maintain their independent and separate selves. It is interesting to note that they have always welcomed every form of scientific investigation into the nature of their own being and the mechanisms of my supernormal functioning; but up to the present any efforts to dislodge them or to reduce them to aspects of my own consciousness have led to no change in their attitude, position, or state of being. The control personalities still maintain the roles they have always played in relation to me, since my trance work began. I have reached a point in my development where I can live in harmony with myself and at peace with those personalities, for I am now able to regard them as the finer aspects of my true self. Whatever their origin may be, I do not, at present, have at my command the means of knowing; but for the time being, I am content to accept the controls as aspects of a constructive principle upon which my entire life has been built." - Eileen Garrett

"I can understand J. Edgar Hoover, because he wasn't inaccurate.… He said that we were the main threat. We were trying to be the main threat. We were trying to be the vanguard organization. J. Edgar Hoover was an adversary, but he had good information. We were plugged into all of the revolutionary groups in America, plus those abroad. We were working hand-in-hand with communist parties here and around the world, and he knew that." - Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

"We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it." - Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

"Nobody is going to buy into the next million [employees] without having some sense what happened to the first million... This is too big for me to put my faith in." - Eleanor Holmes Norton

"The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices. You cannot even simply become a mother anymore. You must choose motherhood. Will you choose change? Can you become its vanguard?" - Eleanor Holmes Norton

"We have trivialized this park, residents make too little use of it, and tourists don't know where it is, ... Neither the city or the federal government has bothered to make maximum use of it. The problem is that it had no plan and it's in a state of great deterioration." - Eleanor Holmes Norton

"Despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

"When we grow old, there can only be one regret - not to have given enough of ourselves." - Eleanora Duse, aka Duse

"Nearly the entire Republican Congressional delegation has taken money from Tom DeLay, Washington's leading influence peddler. He's ground zero in Congress' culture of corruption. Apparently this hasn't dawned on them yet, or they don't care. Most of them are still hanging on to the money." - Eli Pariser

"We believe this is a diversion that Tom DeLay and his lawyer have cooked up to distract from his serious legal problems and presumably that is what Mr. Earle is interested in showing." - Eli Pariser

"A Bookseller might be a King, but a King will never be a Bookseller." - Elias Canetti

"Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves." - Elias Canetti

"One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others." - Elias Canetti

"When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak." - Elias Canetti

"You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all." - Elias Canetti

"Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell." - Elif Safak

"It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around... But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life... As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time." - Elif Safak

"One would expect writers and artists to understand one another better than anyone else and to be more appreciative of one another's works. That, sadly, is not always the case. Writers Rarely say anything positive About each Other." - Elif Safak

"Rebelliousness is Not A good quality in A novice." - Elif Safak

"What is the point of Roaming the world When it's the Same Everywhere misery?" - Elif Safak

"When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another." - Elif Safak

"Why, what's wrong! Religions are like rivers: all flow into a sea. Mother Mary embodies compassion, mercy, love and unconditional love. It is personal, but belongs to everyone. Never mind that you're a Muslim, you can still love her and even called his daughter Maria." - Elif Safak

"Writers write without thinking. These theories are applied later, when literary critics and scholars weigh every sentence of the writer. And when you read these theories, people have the impression that novelists deliberately create stories like this, which is not true." - Elif Safak

"Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity." - Elif Safak

"It is to be observed that every case of war averted is a gain in general, for it helps to form a habit of peace, and community habits long continued become standards of conduct." - Elihu Root

"Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was." - Elihu Root

"Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying, everything except itself. It has made possible the tremendous modern development of power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work to apply them; that the difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline." - Elihu Root

"The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify." - Elihu Root

"War comes today as the result of one of three causes: either actual or threatened wrong by one country to another, or suspicion by one country that another intends to do it wrong ... or, from bitterness of feeling, dependent in no degree whatever upon substantial questions of difference. . . . The least of these three causes of war is actual injustice." - Elihu Root

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism." - Albert Einstein

"Emerald’s children looked up at her out of a coloured earthquake-city. Unnerved by her manner they turned to retreat; gilt, flowered and brightly pictorial boxes scrunched with the unresistance of cardboard under their wildly placed feet. They evacuated, with shaken majesty, an empire of chocolate boxes." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Miss Fitzgerald hurried out of the Hotel into the road. Here she stood still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding sunshine and picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was frightened by an interior quietness and by the thought that she had for once in her life stopped thinking and might never begin again." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Somebody who had come in late had brought him, with an apology, and had whispered an explanation into somebody else’s ear. They had seated him, and he had sat, looking propped-up and a little dejected, like an umbrella that an absent-minded caller had brought into the drawing-room." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste of power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children, or merely role models." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole

"But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope." - Elizabeth Gilbert