Great Throughts Treasury

"They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.’" - Wallace Stevens

"They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture pleased that the irrational is rational." - Wallace Stevens

"Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery,” and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Old Azureus's manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release their hold, a blank expression replace the fervent light of his pale fragile face, and he would leave you as if he had made a mistake, as if after all you were not the loved one - the loved one whom, the next moment, he would espy in another corner, and again the smile would dawn, again the hands would enfold the sparrow, again it would all dissolve." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple" — "Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere" — under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Each player must accept the cards life deals: but once they are in hand, one must decide alone how to play the cards in order to win the game." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Humility is the modesty of the soul. It is the antidote to pride." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind’s ear, …quite enough for everybody at present, she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. 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 in June." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one's mother at Rose's age. Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said she was ready now." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The only thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Turning to God, Truth, Reality, simply means to let go, even fearfully at first, of our self-centered ideas." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"A young man wanted to know the difference between Heaven and Hell. The sage led him to two rooms with observation portals, one labeled Heaven and one Hell. Looking in at Hell he saw a banquet table filled with luscious food but the people at the table were emaciated and distressed. Their spoons had long handles to reach the food, but the handles were too long to bring the food to their mouths. Then he looked in on Heaven. Same table full of luscious food. Same long spoons. But the people were healthy and happy and using their long-handled spoons to feed one another." - Vicki Robin

"How you spend your money is how you vote on what exists in the world" - Vicki Robin

"It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances." - Vicki Robin

"Destiny never opens one door without shutting another." - Victor Hugo

"Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job." - Victor Hugo

"He walked with his head down for the first time in his life, and for the first time in his life as well, with his hands behind his back. Until that day, of Napoleon's two attitudes, Javert had assumed one, the one that expresses resolution, arms folded across breast; the one that expresses uncertainty, hands behind back, was unknown to him." - Victor Hugo

"The possible: that window of the dream opening upon reality. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent. (I.2.iv)" - Victor Hugo

"Those men to whom their gray hairs are a constant warning, and whose time is growing short, have tasks to finish, testaments of the mind, so to speak. They may be suddenly interrupted by the coming of the end, and they have not a day to lose; hence arises the stern necessity of retirement and solitude. Man has duties to fulfill toward his thoughts." - Victor Hugo

"I'm going to play it (Liebestraum by Liszt) with both hands because that way I might get through with it a little faster." - Victor Borge, born Børge Rosenbaum

"One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn't have a fireplace." - Victor Borge, born Børge Rosenbaum

"This is a request from a lady (I sincerely hope). She is an elderly lady. Ah she's an old lady... you might as well face it." - Victor Borge, born Børge Rosenbaum

"Be convinced of one Truth about Me; Swami will never lay his hand on a task without proper reason and without some profound effect that will flow there from." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"I have become a worshipper of the One Name; the Guru has shown me this amazing wonder." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Now, there is a wave of anxiety spreading over the World as a result of rising prices; and attempts are frantically being made to bring down the level." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Render every thought into a flower worthy to be held in His Fingers; render every deed into a fruit, full of the sweet juice of Love fit to be placed in His Hand; render every tear holy and pure, fit to wash His Lotus Feet." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The Name of the Creator is your beloved friend and child; it alone shall go along with you, O my mind." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Yon fluttering little spirit that has been fixed into thy heart, from it the jealousy do I remove, as air from a water-skin." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"What we call a personality is nothing more or less than an amazingly interwoven fabric of impermanent events" - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"We long ago pulled down the great wall which divided us from democratic Europe, but equally we tolerate the slow and inconspicuous growth of new walls, no better than those which fell," - Václav Havel

"That the threat is now intense is not a reason to abandon our quest for knowledge. It is a reason to hold it more tightly, in spite of the need for action to preserve our freedom, in spite of the distractions of living in turmoil, that it may not be lost or brushed aside by the demands of the hour. We would not neglect our duty to our country and our fellows to strive mightily to preserve our ways and our lives. There is an added duty, not inconsistent, not less. It is the duty to so live that there may be a reason for living, beyond the mere mechanisms of life. It is the duty to carry on, under stress, the search for understanding." - Vannevar Bush

"We do not do many great things by counsel." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"And when there is no wind a beast draws along a huge cart, which is a grand sight." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer