Great Throughts Treasury

"O, how wretched is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors! There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to, that sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin, more pangs and fears than wars or women have; and when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again." - William Shakespeare

"One turf shall serve as pillow for us both; one heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth." - William Shakespeare

"ORSINO: How dost thou like this tune? VIOLA: It gives a very echo to the seat where love is throned." - William Shakespeare

"On the third day after the birth of a girl the ancients observed three customs: first to place the baby below the bed; second to give her a potsherd [a piece of broken pottery] with which to play; and third to announce her birth to her ancestors by an offering. Now to lay the baby below the bed plainly indicated that she is lowly and weak, and should regard it as her primary duty to humble herself before others. To give her potsherds with which to play indubitably signified that she should practice labor and consider it her primary duty to be industrious. To announce her birth before her ancestors clearly meant that she ought to esteem as her primary duty the continuation of the observance of worship in the home." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"Good faith is the foundation of right. In everything let there be good faith, for if the lord and the vassal keep faith with one another, what cannot be accomplished? If the lord and the vassal do not keep faith with each other, everything will end in failure." - Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya

"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

"You don’t have to know a philosopher’s every syllable to know why he rubs you the wrong way. You may know it best after a few of his sentences, and les and less well after that. The important thing is to see his web and move away before you tear it." - Elias Canetti

"A man who cries all night until destroyed, and the next morning continued the day with a smile called Woman." - Elif Safak

"There's not a crime but takes its proper change out still in crime if once rung on the counter of this world." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"What's this, Aurora Leigh, you write so of the poets and not laugh? Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, exaggerators of the sun and moon, and soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,— the only speakers of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative, and temporal truths... the only teachers who instruct mankind, from just a shadow on a charnel-wall." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." - English Proverbs

"Let not the sun go down on your wrath." - English Proverbs

"So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a very merry one." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page." - Eudora Welty

"Oh, trebly blest the placid lot of those whose hearth foundations are in pure love laid, where husband's breast with tempered ardor glows, and wife, oft mother, is in heart a maid!" - Euripedes NULL

"One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you." - Faith Baldwin

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." - Hannah Arendt

"Being a cheerful hobbit, he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien