Great Throughts Treasury

"People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Mantua gave me birth, Calabri snatched me away, now Parthenope holds me; I sang of shepherds, pastures, and heroes." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"You need only choose . . . then keep choosing as many times as necessary. That is all you need do. And it is certainly something you can do. Then as you continue to choose, everything is yours." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp who’s suffering and death, bore witness to the fact the last inner freedom can’t be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"God is naturally pervading all places. Sometimes He is hidden, and sometimes He is revealed; thus God has made the world of His making. He Himself wakes us from sleep. No one can estimate His value, although everyone has tried, over and over again, to describe Him." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"I threw off the veil of illusion, when I met my Lord and Master; then, I forgot my jealousy of others." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"May earth provide us with all the things of our requirements just like a 'mother', who breast-feeds her child." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Prayer has been made to all three of them for welfare, success and prosperity." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Stress upon the importance of virtuous living free from any kind of sinful tendencies." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The mortality of mankind is but a part of the process of living - a step on the way to immortality. - Dying, to the good man, is but a brief sleep, from which he wakes to a perfection and fullness of life in eternity." - Tryon Edwards

"Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"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

"In the end, what i have come to believe about God is simple. It's like this - I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, What kind of dog is that? I would always give the same answer: She's a brown dog. Similarly, when the question is raised, What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Are you becoming more and more aware of the interconnection of all beings, creatures and elements? Do you hold as your own Jesus' words: 'And whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me'? Are you getting tired of the way our society celebrates the false ego's selfish and insatiable drive to acquire and use more and more? And does that make you want to be an agent of healing? A declaration of life's interdependence is a sign of spiritual progress." - Elizabeth Lesser

"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is hap­pening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else." - Ernest Becker

"From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study an economics of permanence." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher