Great Throughts Treasury

"Emotions show up in your body as physical manifestations of your thoughts." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Make sure to praise your children at every opportunity." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the wind waves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild." - Wendell Berry

"I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup." - Wendell Berry

"What works poorly in agriculture — monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting — can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugated nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible." - Wendell Berry

"Why have they never studied or questioned the necessity or the justice of the sanitation laws that have been used to destroy such markets?" - Wendell Berry

"You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer." - Wendell Berry

"All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Church, in speaking of punishment for sin, should have chosen the analogy of criminal law, for the analogy is incompatible with the Christian belief in God as the creator of Man. Criminal laws are laws, imposed on men, who are already in existence, with or without their consent, and, with the possible exception of capital punishment for murder, there is no logical relation between the nature of a crime and the penalty inflicted for committing it. If God created man, then the laws of man's spiritual nature must, like the laws of his physical nature, be laws -- laws, that is to say, which he is free to defy but no more free to break than he can break the law of gravity by jumping out of the window, or the laws of biochemistry by getting drunk -- and the consequences of defying them must be as inevitable and as intrinsically related to their nature as a broken leg or a hangover. To state spiritual laws in the imperative -- Thou shalt love God with all thy being, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself -- is simply a pedagogical technique, as when a mother says to her small son, Stay away from the window! because the child does not yet know what will happen if he falls out of it." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it's like some hidden assassin, waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"That other one wanted to think his way to life, sure that the ultimate poem was the mind, or of the mind, or of the mind in these Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind; half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky, half desire for indifference about the sky." - Wallace Stevens

"The country habit has me by the heart, for he's bewitched forever who has seen, not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun, as each man knows the life that fits him best, the shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone, and after ranging on a tentative flight stoops like the merlin to the constant lure." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The tolerance of all religions is a law of nature, stamped on the hearts of all men." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"A tender, loving concern for all living creatures will need to arise and reign in our hearts if any of us is to survive. And our lives will be truly blessed only when the misery of one is genuinely felt to be the misery of all. The force of love is the force of total revolution. It is the unreleased force, unknown and unexplored as a dynamic for change." - Vimala Thakar

"All our emotions and thoughts are conditioned reflexes, reactions." - Vimala Thakar

"Generally we waste energy in unessential secondary things. This criminal waste leaves us tired and troubled at the end of the day. An overtired and emotionally disturbed person cannot sleep profoundly. The sacred night is wasted and you begin the next day with a sluggish body and a lethargic mind." - Vimala Thakar

"I am a simple person, a human being who has loved life and who has seen life as divinity itself. I have lived in love with life, madly in love with the human expression of life as divinity!" - Vimala Thakar

"Most of us are not aware of our motivations for living or our priorities for action. We drift with the tides of societal fashions, floating in and out of social concerns at the whim of societal dictates and on the basis of images created by the media or superficial, personal desires to be helpful, useful persons. We are used to living at the surface, afraid of the depths, and therefore our actions and concerns about humanity are shallow, fragile vessels easily damaged. Ultimately most of us are concerned chiefly with our small lives, our collection of sensual pleasures, our personal salvation, and our anxiety about sickness and death, rather than the misery created by collective indifference and callousness." - Vimala Thakar

"Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life." - Vimala Thakar

"The thoughts cannot be suppressed nor can they be thrown away anywhere, you can only watch them, not naming them as good or bad. Then you are free from the roles of an experiencer and an actor, you enter into the state of an observer of non-reactional attention." - Vimala Thakar

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"If you tell the truth about yourself, you can hardly tell the other people." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely, folded her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Since our appearances, that part of us which appears, are so fleeting compared to the other, the unseen part of us, stretching away, means that the unseen can survive, be recovered somehow attached to a person or another , or even haunting certain places after death." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

"Destiny never opens one door without shutting another." - Victor Hugo

"It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots." - Victor Hugo

"The trained mind is torn by fear; the pure elevated mind is placid and unruffled, like that of a homeless Sage." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"There are three types of knowledge: Knowledge of matter-energy; knowledge of mental energy; and knowledge of cosmic energy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for." - Václav Havel

"As long as scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems." - Vannevar Bush

"I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it" - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"Another lean unwashed artificer cuts off his tale and talks of Arthur's death. The Life and Death of King John (Hubert at IV, ii)" - William Shakespeare

"Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear in all my miseries; but thou hast forced me (out of thy honest truth) to play the woman. Henry VIII, Act iii, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare

"Done to death by slanderous tongue was the Hero that here lies. Much Ado about Nothing. Act v. Sc. 3." - William Shakespeare

"For there is such a thing as a broken spirit." - William Godwin

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true." - William James

"What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?" - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"And thus we all are nighing the truth we fear to know: death will end our crying for friends that come and go." - Edwin Arlington Robinson

"False ambition serves the neck." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Anna Partridge, whose brain was all shreddy with rabbit-combing and raffia, had had electric light for years, just from living in England; even the Trents talked of harnessing their waterfall." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more,—Macbeth shall sleep no more!" - William Shakespeare

"The other day in prayer I said to God, Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people." - Elizabeth Gilbert