Great Throughts Treasury

"Sexual inhibition alters the structure of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests." - Wilhelm Reich

"The prophet is engaged in a battle for language in an effort to create a different epistemology out of which another community might emerge." - Walter Brueggemann

"Theologically, however, the freedom and hope of the local tradition of the church depends upon trusting and saying aloud the conviction that the U.S. empire does not finally merit fear, trust, or eventually obedience." - Walter Brueggemann

"You may say you are already doing this; you see and hear nothing of worldly ways, you do not employ your bodily senses more than is necessary. If indeed you are doing this you have closed a large window in this image, but you are not yet safe, because you have not closed the hidden openings of your imagination. So if you deliberately allow yourself to consider the vanities of this world, or to think of comfort and ease, then, although your soul may remain in you as far as the bodily senses are concerned, it is in fact being lured away by these vain fancies." - Walter Hilton

"If we believe that this particular pain is the one that will push the baby out of the womb and into our arms, we somehow try to make a place for that pain in our heart. Pain is still there: excruciating, terrible pain. But at the moment of birth, we rarely feel betrayal or rage; we somehow feel that this is simply pain that has come with life." - Wayne Muller

"Experience the mystery of pain, open to it, allow it. When you do, the experience shifts. What basically generates pain is the defense against it." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"Pitiless verse? A few words tuned and tuned and tuned and tuned. It is good." - Wallace Stevens

"I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"This [faculty], to which I give the name of the “elaborative faculty,”—the faculty of relations or comparisons,—constitutes what is properly denominated thought." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power." - William James

"Man can alter his life by altering his thinking." - William James

"Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do." - William James

"The constituents (gunas) consist in the pleasant, the painful and the delusive; they serve the purpose of illumination, activity and restraint; they are mutually dominating, dependent, productive, cooperative and coexistent." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

"And yet, let the nature of these perceptions be what it will, and let them be produced as they will, if we look amongst them for the idea of extension, for instance, of a line, of an angle, and any other figure, we shall find it in that repository very clearly and distinctly." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Hence the prejudice of the ancients against separating the music from the words. Music was in regard to them, very steady what recitation is to us: by it they learnt so regulate the voice, which before that time was under no fort of direction." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"In forming a habit of communicating to one another this fort of ideas by actions, mankind accustomed themselves to determine them; and from that time they began to find a greater ease in connecting them with other signs." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"The prosody of different languages does not deviate equally from music. In some it affects a greater, in some a lesser variety of accents, because from the variety of constitutions in people of different climates, it is impossible they should have the same sensibility." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"There is evidence that the faculty of reflection will appear as soon as our senses begin to develop, and it is equally true that we have the use of the senses from an early age, just because at an early age we began to reflect." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Our enemy is not Islam. Islam is not the enemy of America; Americans are not the enemy of Islam. Our real enemy is extremism and radicalism." - Feisal Abdul Rauf