Great Throughts Treasury

"Devo farmi le ossa. (I need to make my bones)" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more that I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I've overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Prostration would become cold and drown in boredom fashionable to let your attention Liszt for." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's fial destination - the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"The whole acuity of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life and being. In this sense suffering is the impossibility of nothingness." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"Self-awareness does not precede apprehension of the world: one is not before the other; one is not without the other." - Erwin Straus

"There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged." - Erving Goffman

"In order to be one, you must first be two." - Esther Perel

"Tell me where is the hope of the man who happens to sixty years without something else that hope." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy." - Eugene Peterson

"That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it." - Eugene Peterson

"If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In the work of the Lord there should be no serious mistakes. The most important point of your planning should be on your knees." - Ezra Taft Benson

"The environmental crisis can only be forestalled when there is a broad new cultural understanding of what it means to be human. Sources of this new understanding would be myth – New Story…… a spiritually based on an understanding of nature as the primary revelation of the divine" -

"The nobility of our lives, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role." -

"Staying chaste until marriage, a commandment of my faith, was one of the most difficult challenges of my young life. I had a powerful sense that if I did not get a grip on my identity, my ethics, and my religion, I would go off the rails." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"Never had he beheld such a magnificent brown skin, so entrancing a figure, such dainty transparent fingers. He stood gazing in wonder at her work-basket as if it was something extraordinary. What was her name? Where did she live and what sort of life about did she lead? What was her past? He wanted to know what furniture she had in her bedroom, the dresses she wore, the people she knew. Even his physical desire for her gave way to a deeper yearning, a boundless, aching curiosity." - Gustave Flaubert

"One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form." - Gustave Flaubert

"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us." - Gustave Flaubert

"People get the government they deserve." - Italian Proverbs

"That which the wise man does first, the fool does last." - Italian Proverbs

"A principal source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family...Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"A time may come soon, said he, when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised. She answered: All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honor, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death. What do you fear, lady? he asked. A cage, she said. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Don't ever laugh at live Dragons, Bilbo you fool!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Follow what may, great deeds are not lessened in worth." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien