Great Throughts Treasury

"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit." - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman

"Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter." - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman

"We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write." - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman

"Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales." - Neil Postman

"We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what sort of nonsense will lodge in people's heads." - Neil Postman

"But in the end, science does not provide the answers most of us require. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. To the question, How did it all begin?, science answers, Probably by an accident. To the question, How will it all end?, science answers, Probably by an accident. And to many people, the accidental life is not worth living. Moreover, the science-god has no answer to the question, Why are we here? and, to the question, What moral instructions do you give us?, the science-god maintains silence." - Neil Postman

"A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"They say that all the thoughts of all one’s incarnations are reflected in the eyes. The eyes reveal the whole story of the soul, not only of this life but of past lives." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. " - Paul Davies

"I think progress in religion is actually great idea and I think if ever there is a time we need progress, it is now. Religion isn't going to go away, whatever Richard Dawkins says. People aren't just going to be persuaded that religion is all nonsense so we'll just drop it. People, even atheists, have what (evolutionary theologian) John F. Haught calls 'a God-shaped hole in their hearts.' Everyone has some sort of spiritual yearning and we need to recognize that human dimension. It may not be the whole story but I think scientists should be sensitive to the fact that people have those genuine needs." - Paul Davies

"Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles. " - Paul Samuelson, fully Paul Anthony Samuelson

"Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum… Behind the mask of ice that people wear, there beats a heart of fire… Being human means having doubts and yet still continuing on your path… Because there are no ends, there are only means… But before I die, I want to fight for life… But choose your way and follow it to the end. " - Paulo Coelho

"When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they were exercising their freedom of choice....Before eating the fruit, they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit, they acquired this knowledge; and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom...Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions....by defying God, Adam and Eve grew to maturity in his image." - Pelagius NULL

"The essence of practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines." - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

"There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life. " - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

"The whole Earth is the Sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on Stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives." - Pericles NULL

"The scientific method is a potentiation of common sense, exercised with a specially firm determination not to persist in error if any exertion of hand or mind can deliver us from it. Like other exploratory processes, it can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case. The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World—a story which we invent and criticise and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life. " - Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar

"Death is the end of one story and the beginning of another." - Philip Moeller

"Many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request. " - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"I was born at home on newspapers... I still have a story on my butt, although now the print is much larger." - Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver

"But passive compassion alone is not enough to achieve victory in the struggle against inhumanity. A Buddhist story that illustrates the inadequacy of the mere feeling of compassion tells of a mother with paralyzed arms who helplessly watched her child being swept away along a fast-flowing river. Those who are compassionate but who do not possess the wisdom to find the means of relieving the sufferings of their fellow human beings are compared to that mother. Meaningful compassion has to be active; it must seek the means to bring comfort to those who are in need of succor. Wisdom is necessary to enable us to discover those means." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

"However, we should not consider wisdom therefore superior to compassion. If compassion without wisdom can be illustrated by the story of the paralyzed mother, wisdom without compassion can be illustrated by a boatman who sits in his craft and eyes the hapless infant sweeping past on the current without making any effort to save it. Wisdom too can be as ineffective as passive compassion if there is no urge to use it to help others." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

"Implicitly adopting the male life as the norm, they have tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth. It all goes back to Adam and Eve a story which shows . . . that if you make a woman out of man, you are bound to get into trouble." - Carol Gilligan

"It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble." - Carol Gilligan

"That was where the story of my childhood finally broke through. Today, I am convinced that I have only been willing and able to face up to my true feelings thanks to the existence of my daughter. She would tell me frankly and uninhibitedly what she saw in my pictures and what she felt about them, something that otherwise only very few people did. It was a kind of emotional communication which I found very precious… Without the relationship with my daughter I would have been even more remote from myself that I already was… In many ways it is only now, in retrospect, that I begin to appreciate something like the full extent of the boon my daughter has been to me." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski

"From my perspective, this is part of the continuing political campaign against my husband... I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this. They have popped up in other settings. The great story here for anybody willing to find it, write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. " - Albert Einstein

"Is Humanism a religion, perhaps, the next great religion? Yes, it must be so characterized, for the word, religion, has become a symbol for answers to that basic interrogation of human life, the human situation, and the nature of things---which every human being, in some degree and in some fashion, makes. What can I expect from life? What kind of universe is it? Is there, as some say, a friendly Providence in control of it? And, if not, what then? The universe of discourse of religion consists of such questions, and the answers relevant to them. Christian theism and Vedantic mysticism are but historic frameworks in relation to which answers have in the past been given to these poignant and persistent queries. But there is nothing sacrosanct and self-certifying about these frameworks. What Humanism represents is the awareness of another framework, more consonant with wider and deeper knowledge about man and his world. The Humanist movement is engaged in formulating answers, with what wisdom it can achieve, to these basic questions. It would be absurd to expect complete novelty in either framework or answers. Many people throughout the ages have had a shrewd suspicion that established beliefs were insecurely based. Humanism at its best represents a growth and a maturing of its perspective...I fear that the orthodox idea of religion is something static and given---once for all. The Humanist thinks of his answers as responsible ones, that is, responsible to the best thought and knowledge on the subjects involved. He [they are] is always ready for honest debate... I want to contrast the perspective of Humanism with that of traditional rationalism...There is no Humanist who does not appreciate with respect and admiration the moving story of the Gospels. Seen as one of the culminations of Judaism in the setting of the Roman Empire, it speaks to us of nobility of soul, human love, pity, and comradeship; and this among everyday people fired by moral and religious leadership of high quality. The heroic and the earthly touch meet, and mingle; and so it has been ever since... What have the intervening centuries made possible? The gradual disentangling of ethical principle and example from both the early framework of belief and the later ecclesiastical development of power and dogma which supervened. But the notes of love and self-sacrifice remain as perennial chords. This also, is greatly human. The older rationalism was on the defensive. And so it expressed itself too often in negative terms: not this; not that; not God; not revelation; not personal immortality. What Humanism signified was a shift from negation to construction. There came a time when naturalism no longer felt on the defensive. Rather, supernaturalism began, it its eyes, to grow dim and fade out despite all the blustering and rationalizations of its advocates." - R. W. Sellars, fully Roy Wood Sellars

""You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?"" - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt

"A story must pay its own way by contributing a thought." - Ralph C. Smedley

"Dreams are private, she said. And she is right. A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read." - Lloyd Jones

"In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

"Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey." - Raymond Queneau

"It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history." - Raymond Queneau

"The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side." - Raymond Queneau

"To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement." - Raymond Queneau

"When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing." - Raymond Queneau

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"Hammett was the ace performer.... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"Hollywood's] idea of "production value" is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamor-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"The story is the man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad." - Richard Dawkins

"Once again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again, the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not." - Richard Dawkins

"Our mountaineers are too ambitious. So intent are they on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look round the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands. Occasionally the gradual ascent is punctuated by a small, rocky crag, but you can usually find a detour that is not too steep for a fit hill-walker in stout shoes and with time to spare. The sheer height of the peak doesn't matter, so long as you don't try to scale it in a single bound. Locate the mildly sloping path and, if you have unlimited time, the ascent is only as formidable as the next step. The story of Mount Improbable is, of course, a parable. We shall explore its meaning in this and the next chapters." - Richard Dawkins