Great Throughts Treasury

"About being a U.S. Senator, the only thing the law says you have to be is 30 years old. Not another single requirement. They just figure that a man that old got nobody to blame but himself if he gets caught there." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The Ways and Means Committee is a committee that's supposed to find the Ways to divide up the Means." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Everyone falls down. Getting back up is how you learn how to walk." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"I desire the love of God not because I am worthy, but because I am unworthy." - Walter Hilton

"There are many who are hypocrites although they think they are not, and there are many who are afraid of being hypocrites although they certainly are not. Which is the one and which is the other God knows, and none but He." - Walter Hilton

"I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle." - Wendell Berry

"If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds. . . . Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long." - Wendell Berry

"The consecration is a solemn transaction between God and the parish, as well as between the bishop and the parish--the parish, through its vestry and by a legal instrument, making the building over to God through the hands of the bishop; and God graciously accepting the gift and ratifying the transaction by the bishop's sentence of consecration, which declares it "separated henceforth from all unhallowed, ordinary, and common uses, and dedicated to the sole service of Almighty God." Henceforth this edifice is no more yours, but God's. Given to Him by your corporate and legal act, His name has been recorded here, His presence will be vouchsafed here, and each one of you, as you enter into these courts, can say with joyous hearts, "Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary."" - W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens

"He held the world upon his nose and this-a-way he gave a fling. His robes and symbols, ai-hi-hi and that-a-way he twirled the thing. Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats moved in the grass without a sound." - Wallace Stevens

"I am a little deaf, a little blind, a little impotent, and on top of this are two or three abominable infirmities, but nothing destroys my hope." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I have only made but one prayer in my life: O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. [in response to Rousseau's The Social Contract]" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"My soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is its frame." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The fate of a nation has often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"To him the idea of life was not distinct from the idea of Cosette; he had decreed in his heart that he would not accept the one without the other, and he was unalterably determined to demand from anybody, no matter whom, who might wish to compel him to live, from his grandfather, from Fate, even from Hell, the restitution of his vanished Eden." - Victor Hugo

"Again and again I admonish my students both in America and Europe: 'Don't aim at success--the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run--in the long run, I say--success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.'" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"I will get all My people near Me, for they are Mine, and I am theirs. Then, I will start teaching and training them, until they become entirely ego-free. For the last 25 years, it has all been sweetness, kindness, soft persuasion; hereafter, it will be different. I will drag them, place them on the table and operate. That is to say, I have no anger or hate. I have only Love." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"A deserved and discriminating compliment is often one of the strongest encouragements and incentives to the diffident and self-distrustful." - Tryon Edwards

"Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin." - Tryon Edwards

"Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"For God Himself works in our souls, in the deepest depths, taking increasing control as we are progressively willing to be prepared for His wonder." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"I have in mind something deeper than the simplification of our external programs, our absurdly crowded calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly and frantically gasp. These do become simplified in holy obedience, and the poise and peace we have been missing can really be found. But there is a deeper, an internal simplification of the whole of one's personality, stilled, tranquil, in childlike trust listening ever to Eternity's whisper, walking with a smile into the dark." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"And blind oblivion swallowed cities up." - William Shakespeare

"Consideration, like an angel came and whipp'd the offending Adam out of him, leaving his body as a paradise to envelope and contain celestial spirits. King Henry V. Act i. Sc. 1." - William Shakespeare

"Of all creatures in this visible world, light is the most glorious; of all light, the light of the sun without compare excels the rest." - William Gurnall

"But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about." - William James

"Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic." - William James

"All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness." - William Law

"Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: When a man has had so much benefit from the gospel, as to know his own misery, his want of a redeemer, who he is, and how is he to be found; there everything seems to be done, both to awaken and direct his prayer, and make it a true praying in and by the Spirit. For when the heart really pants and longs after God, its prayer is a praying, as moved and animated by the Spirit of God; it is the breath or inspiration of God, stirring, moving and opening itself in the heart. For though the early nature, our old man, can oblige or accustom himself to take heavenly words at certain times into his mouth, yet this is a certain truth, that nothing ever did, or can have the least desire or tendency to ascend to heaven, but that which came down from heaven; and therefore nothing in the heart can pray, aspire, and long after God, but the Spirit of God moving and stirring in it." - William Law

"Covetousness, pride, and envy are not three different things, but only three different names for the restless workings of one and the same will or desire. Wrath, which is a fourth birth from these three, can have no existence till one or all of these three are contradicted, or have something done to them that is contrary to their will. These four properties generate their own torment. They have no outward cause, nor any inward power of altering themselves. And therefore all self or nature must be in this state until some supernatural good comes into it, or gets a birth in it. Whilst man indeed lives among the vanities of time, his covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath may be in a tolerable state, may hold him to a mixture of peace and trouble; they may have at times their gratifications as well as their torments. But when death has put an end to the vanity of all earthly cheats, the soul that is not born again of the Supernatural Word and Spirit of God, must find itself unavoidably devoured and shut up in its own insatiable, unchangeable, self-tormenting covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath." - William Law

"God is always present and always working towards the life of the soul and its deliverance from captivity under flesh and blood. But this inward work of God, though never ceasing or altering, is yet always and only hindered by the activity of our own nature and faculties, by bad men through their obedience to earthly passions and by good men through their striving to be good in their own way, by their natural strength and a multiplicity of holy labors and contrivances. Both these sorts of people obstruct the work of God upon their souls. For we can cooperate with God no other way than by submitting to the work of God, and seeking, and leaving ourselves to it." - William Law

"Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God." - William Law

"Perhaps it may he found more easy to forget the language than to part entirely with those tempers which we learnt in misery." - William Law

"Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator." - William Law

"The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him." - William Law

"There is a joy which is not given to the ungodly, but to those who love Thee for Thine own sake, whose joy Thou Thyself art. And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this it is, and there is no other... The merit of persons is to be no rule of our charity; but we are to do acts of kindness to those that least of all deserve it." - William Law

"Think upon the vanity and shortness of human life, and let death and eternity be often in your minds." - William Law

"Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers, who has so singularly favored the American people in every national trial, and who will not forsake us so long as we obey His commandments and walk humbly in His footsteps." - William McKinley

"Protect, detect, react and deter. For example, firewalls are only of any real use if you master them and take action when you notice something wrong." - William Morris

"O, then, what graces in my love do dwell That he hath turned a heaven unto a hell!" - William Shakespeare

"Sometimes the brightest day hath cloud, and summer evermore succeeds barren winter with its wrathful, nipping cold.—So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet." - William Shakespeare

"I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that’s not fair to say. To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time—everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else. I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how it’s always been. Sometime after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.But I love him.So love him.But I miss him.So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The other night we talked about the terms we use while let us take comfort someone desperate. I told him in English, sometimes we say, Been there. I explained to him that the deep sadness as a specific place, with its coordinates on the map of time. When you find yourself in that forest of sorrow, you can not imagine you'll ever find a way to a better place. But, if someone fails to convince that he was in the same place, but it has left, it can sometimes bring hope." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer." - Elizabeth Gilbert