Great Throughts Treasury

"There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other areas is going to shift to open-source communities." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"In man, then, let us take the amount that is extruded by the individual beats, and that cannot return into the heart because of the barrier set in its way by the valves, as half an ounce, or three drachms, or at least one drachm. In half an hour the heart makes over a thousand beats; indeed, in some individuals, and on occasion, two, three, or four thousand. If you multiply the drachms per beat by the number of beats you will see that in half an hour either a thousand times three drachms or times two drachms, or five hundred ounces, or other such proportionate quantity of blood has been passed through the heart into the arteries, that is, in all cases blood in greater amount than can be found in the whole of the body. Similarly in the sheep or the dog. Let us take it that one scruple passes in a single contraction of the heart; then in half an hour a thousand scruples, or three and a half pounds of blood, do so. In a body of this size, as I have found in the sheep, there is often not more than four pounds of blood." - William Harvey

"Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply." - Elias Canetti

"I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Some people are more sensitive to the lie of cultural life, to the illusions of the causa-sui project that others are so thoughtlessly and trustingly caught up in. The neurotic is having trouble with the balance of cultural illusion and natural reality; the possible horrible truth about himself and the world is seeping into his consciousness. The average man is at least secure that the cultural game is the truth, the unshakable, durable truth. He can earn his immortality in and under the dominant immortality ideology, period. It is all so simple and clear-cut. But now the neurotic." - Ernest Becker

"He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Everywhere people ask: "What can I actually do?" The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"I have talked about the religion of economics, the idol worship of material possessions, of consumption and the so-called standard of living, and the fateful propensity that rejoices in the fact that "what were luxuries to our fathers have become necessities for us."" - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"We see plainly what were the subjects of the earliest poems. At the first institution of societies, mankind could not as yet employ themselves in matters of amusement; so that the wants which obliged them to unite, at the fame time confined their views to whatever might be useful or necessary to them. Therefore poetry and music were cultivated merely with a design to promote the knowledge of religion and laws, or to preserve the memory of great men, and of the services which they had done to society." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business." - Eugene Peterson

"Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"My role on the planet is to bring the power of sound." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie

"And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien