Great Throughts Treasury

"Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"An honest man will never employ an equivocal expression; a confused man may often utter ambiguous ones without any design." - Hugh Blair

"By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends." - Hugh Blair

"A slow smile bent back his foliage. I’ve a mind to lay you down and split you like a rack of mutton. What do you say to that?" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: 'Who knows how to make love stay?'" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his testicles. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"My grandmother, he said, confessed to me once that before she'd ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she'd make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you've seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It's a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks." - William James

"But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points." - William James

"But who does not see that in a disbelieved or doubted or interrogative or conditional proposition, the ideas are combined in the same identical way in which they are in a proposition which is solidly believed." - William James

"In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down." - 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

"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." - William James

"The practical consequence of such an individualistic philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,—is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess." - William James

"Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not." - William James

"What an awful trade that of professor is - paid to talk, talk, talk! It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." - William James

"When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in." - William James

"He that rightly understands the reasonableness and excellency of charity will know that it can never be excusable to waste any of our money in pride and folly." - William Law

"If there be nothing so glorious as doing good, if there is nothing that makes us so like God, then nothing can be so glorious in the use of our money as to use it all in works of love and goodness." - William Law

"No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress." - William Law

"Our hearts deceive us, because we leave them to themselves, are absent from them, taken up in outward rules and forms of living and praying. But this kind of praying, which takes all its thoughts and words only from the state of our hearts, makes it impossible for us to be strangers to ourselves. The strength of every sin, the power of every evil temper, the most secret workings of our hearts, the weakness of any or all our virtues, is with a noonday clearness forced to be seen, as soon as the heart is made our prayer book, and we pray nothing, but according to what we read, and find there." - William Law

"Persons that are well affected to religion, that receive instructions of piety with pleasure and satisfaction, often wonder how it comes to pass that they make no greater progress in that religion which they so much admire. Now the reason of it is this: it is because religion lives only in their head, but something else has possession of their heart; and therefore they continue from year to year mere admirers and praisers of piety, without ever coming up to the reality and perfection of its precepts." - William Law

"Piety requires us to renounce no ways of life where we can act reasonably, and offers what we do to the glory of God." - William Law

"Repentance is but a kind of table-talk, till we see so much of the deformity of our inward nature as to be in some degree frightened and terrified at the sight of it. . . . A plausible form of an outward life, that has only learned rules and modes of religion by use and custom, often keeps the soul for some time at ease, though all its inward root and ground of sin has never been shaken or molested, though it has never tasted of the bitter waters of repentance and has only known the want of a Saviour by hearsay. But things cannot pass thus: sooner or later repentance must have a broken and a contrite heart; we must with our blessed Lord go over the brook Cedron, and with Him sweat great drops of sorrow before He can say for us, as He said for Himself: "It is finished."" - William Law

"Where has the Scripture made merit the rule or measure of charity?" - William Law

"Why all this strife and zeal about opinions? Death and life go on their own way, carry on their own work, and stay for no opinions... What a delusion it is therefore to grow gray-headed in balancing ancient and modern opinions; to waste the precious uncertain fire of life in critical zeal and verbal animosities; when nothing but the kindling of our working will into a faith that overcometh the world, into a steadfast hope, and ever-burning love and desire of the divine life, can hinder us from falling into eternal death." - William Law

"It is the penalty of fame that a man must ever keep rising. - "Get a reputation, and then go to bed," is the absurdest of all maxims. - "Keep up a reputation or go to bed," would be nearer the truth." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"But I wish to point out that it is entirely wrong to say that the Chinese are not religious." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

"No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

"Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured; bears, indeed, about the same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man; yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure sign of hostility to religion." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed." - Elif Safak

"When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another." - Elif Safak

"Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I have my own set of survival techniques. I am patient. I know how to pack light. But my one might travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make friends with the dead. If there isn’t anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of sheetrock. That is why I’m not afraid to travel to the most remote places in the world, not if there are human beings there to meet. People asked me before I left, do you have friends [there]?’ and I would just shake my head no, thinking to myself, But I will." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us--secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us." - Elizabeth Lesser

"It does pay to be honest. It pays in rewarding relationships. It pays in unblocked energy. It pays in passion. To stand tall in who you are, unafraid to reveal what you want and need, kind enough to tell the truth, and brave enough to bear the consequences, is a telling sign of spiritual development." - Elizabeth Lesser

"Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living." - Elizabeth Lesser

"Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Asexual reproduction by females, parthenogenesis, is not only possible but it still occurs here and there in the modern world, perhaps as an atavistic survival of the once only means of reproduction in an all-female world." - Elizabeth Gould Davis

"I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"All union is effected by love, and love is not love without trust." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"Colours in vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death." - Emil Nolde

"Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!" - Emile Zola

"Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root." - Emma Goldman

"Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment in the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the honest workingman." - Emma Goldman

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies." - Emma Goldman