Great Throughts Treasury

"I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid. I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear. I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word - Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred. Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years… I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid. " - Sara Teasdale, born Sara Trevor Teasdale, aka Sara Teasdale Filsinger

"Rose-Morals - I. -- Red. Would that my songs might be What roses make by day and night -- Distillments of my clod of misery Into delight. Soul, could'st thou bare thy breast As yon red rose, and dare the day, All clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest? Say yea -- say yea! Ah, dear my Rose, good-bye; The wind is up; so; drift away. That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly, I strive, I pray. II. -- White. Soul, get thee to the heart Of yonder tuberose: hide thee there -- There breathe the meditations of thine art Suffused with prayer. Of spirit grave yet light, How fervent fragrances uprise Pure-born from these most rich and yet most white Virginities! Mulched with unsavory death, Grow, Soul! unto such white estate, That virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath, Thy work, thy fate." - Sidney Lanier

"You're water. We're the millstone. You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes. You're spirit. We're the opening and closing of our hands. You're the clarity. We're the language that tries to say it. You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laughing." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"There is one other business where the customer is always wrong and that's the media." - Rush Limbaugh

"There is time for work and a time for play." - Russian Proverbs

"Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"The President of the United States of necessity owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party... but he should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"I probably felt more resentment for what I personally was to suffer than for the wrong they were doing to anyone and everyone. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good people." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!" - Salvor Hardin

"The ultimate mystery is one's own self." - Sammy Davis, Jr., born Samuel George "Sammy" Davis Jr.

"Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it-torn up to irrecoverable tatters." - Samuel Butler

"Several times the proposition to form a labor party has been considered by the trade union movement, but after careful and thorough consideration it has been invariably decided that we can attain our purposes more quickly and more effectively by continuing our political policy of independent political action partisan to principles rather than to a party." - Samuel Gompers

"The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good, and the fear of evil." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not. The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony." - Simone Weil

"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"My dear Watson, Professor Moriarty is not a man who lets the grass grow under his feet." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart. But when God's grace touches our innermost minds to bring understanding, his word which has been received by the ear sinks deep into the heart." - Isidore of Seville, fully Saint Isidore of Seville NULL

"True to our traditions, we have avoided all extremes. We have steered clear of fascism, communism, dictatorship, and we have shown the world that democratic government, constitutional methods and ordered liberty are not inconsistent with progress and prosperity." - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred. " - Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz

"I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions—and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Truly grand and powerful theories… do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory... If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly." - Stephan Jay Gould

"If every attribute of the Deity were a distinct member, holiness would be the soul to animate them. Without holiness His patience would be an indulgence to sin, His mercy a fondness, His wrath a madness, His power a tyranny, His wisdom an unworthy subtlety.Holiness gives decorum to them all." - Stephen Charnock

"On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that." - Stephen Hawking

"The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" - Stephen Hawking

"People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"It is better to be faithful than famous." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Religion's home is in the conscience.—Its watchword is the word "ought."—Its highest joy is in doing God's will." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

"That which the sun doth not now see will be visible when the sun is out, and the stars are fallen from heaven." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne

"With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!" - Thomas Carlyle

"To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience." - Thomas Hardy

"There is even a happiness - that makes the heart afraid." - Thomas Hood

"A spirit... of gambling in our public paper has seized on too many of our citizens, and we fear it will check our commerce, arts, manufactures, and agriculture, unless stopped." - Thomas Jefferson

"Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, andc. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent." - Thomas Jefferson

"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ... It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best." - Thomas Jefferson

"Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness." - Thomas Jefferson

"When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property." - Thomas Jefferson

"When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

"Life consists in learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one’s own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." - Thomas Merton

"Now one of the things we must cast out first of all is fear. Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. If we were terrified of God as an inexorable judge, we would not confidently await His mercy, or approach Him trustfully in prayer." - Thomas Merton

"With that she sprung full lightlie to my lips, and fast about the neck me colle's and clips. She wanton faint's, and fall's upon hir bed and often tosseth too and fro hir head. She shutts hir eyes, and waggles with hir tongue: Oh, who is able to abstaine so long?" - Thomas Nashe

"From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom," - Thomas Paine

"The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and undiscoverable thing, called perpetual motion, would establish itself. It is because motion is not a property of matter, that perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being, but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to Atheism can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to be credited." - Thomas Paine

"Fret not over bygones and the forward journey take. Only a short distance have I gone astray, and I know today I am right, if yesterday was a complete mistake… Ah, homeward bound I go! Let me from now on learn to live alone! The world and I are not made for one another, and why drive round like one looking for what he has not found?" - Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL

"Margaritae Sorori - A late lark twitters from the quiet skies: And from the west, Where the sun, his day's work ended, Lingers as in content, There falls on the old, gray city An influence luminous and serene, A shining peace. The smoke ascends In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires Shine and are changed. In the valley Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, Closing his benediction, Sinks, and the darkening air Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night-- Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep. So be my passing! My task accomplish'd and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gather'd to the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

"Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear." -