Great Throughts Treasury

"Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Right actions in the future are the best explanations or apologies for wrong ones in the past; the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive." - Tryon Edwards

"Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated." - Tryon Edwards

"As yet, it must be owned, this daring expectation is but feebly reflected in our books. In looking over any collection of American poetry, for instance, one is struck with the fact that it is not so much faulty as inadequate. Emerson set free the poetic intuition of America, Hawthorne its imagination. Both looked into the realm of passion, Emerson with distrust, Hawthorne with eager interest; but neither thrilled with its spell, and the American poet of passion is yet to come. How tame and manageable are wont to be the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions! There is no baptism of fire; no heat that breeds excess. Yet it is not life that is grown dull, surely; there are as many secrets in every heart, as many skeletons in every closet, as in any elder period of the world’s career. It is the interpreters of life who are found wanting, and that not on this soil alone, but throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not just to say, as someone has said, that our language has not in this generation produced a love-song, for it has produced Browning; but was it in England or in Italy that he learned to sound the depths of all human emotion?" - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Taste may change, but inclination never." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Work means so many things! So many! Among other things, work also means freedom... Without it even the miracle of love is only a cruel deception." - Eleanora Duse, aka Duse

"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

"I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I think I deserve something beautiful." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I shall desire you all, my lords, (chiefly you of the nobility, everyone in his degree and power) to be assistant to me that I, with my ruling, and you with your service, may make a good account to Almighty God and leave some comfort to our posterity on earth." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"The people often slandered as greedy geezers seem to have a perspective from their place in history. The elders in my family remember the Depression. The baby boomers remember dot-com boom and bust. We all have albums of best laid plans." - Ellen Goodman

"Each time I think of the essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech." - Emil M. Cioran

"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers." - Emil M. Cioran

"Popping to die, I'd rather die of passion than die of boredom" - Emile Zola

"Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. With "smart" technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says that "people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless," he is not wrong: This is the future we're headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there. A more humane smart-design paradigm would happily acknowledge that the task of technology is not to liberate us from problem-solving. Rather, we need to enroll smart technology in helping us with problem-solving. What we want is not a life where friction and frustrations have been carefully designed out, but a life where we can overcome the frictions and frustrations that stand in our way. Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. Unless designers of smart technologies take stock of the complexity and richness of the lived human experience—with its gaps, challenges and conflicts—their inventions will be destined for the SmartBin of history." - Evgeny Morozov

"If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men - and cowards." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"Who does not obey the parents' word will be taught by the world." - Estonian Proverbs

"Who promises much will give little." - Estonian Proverbs

"A small oversight, but it proved fatal. Small oversights often do." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars for ever dwell: I will not say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien