Great Throughts Treasury

"You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it." - Wilhelm Reich

"Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"That a Man should know the measure of his Gift, that he may desire and take a better when God giveth it." - Walter Hilton

"A large part of the mischief and folly of the world comes from rushing in, taking a position, and then not knowing how to retreat. There is something about making a speech or writing an article which perverts the human mind. When the utterance is published, the Rubicon has been crossed and the bridges have been burned. It seems to end in the inquiry, after that we almost cease to be interested in the truth, being so preoccupied to prove that we already possess it." - Walter Lippmann

"Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly lie, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, with it, noetic activity." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"The grapholect bears the marks of the millions of minds which have used it to share their consciousnesses with one another. Into it has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Webster's Third New World Dictionary (1971) states in its Preface that it could have included "many times" more than the 450,000 words it does include. Assuming that "many times" must mean at least three times, and rounding out the figures, we can understand that the editors have on hand a record of some million and a half words used in print in English. Oral languages and oral dialects can get along with perhaps five thousand words or less." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Where grapholects exist, "correct" grammar and usage are popularly interpreted as the grammar and usage of the grapholect itself to the exclusion of the grammar and usage of the other dialects." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Many stock options in the corporate world have worked in exactly that fashion: they have gained in value simply because management retained earnings, not because it did well with the capital in its hands." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"?Our thoughts are a field of energy cycles, a mind field, and just by our thoughts alone we impact not only ourselves but those around us as well." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Send out love and harmony, put your mind and body in a peaceful place, and then allow the universe to work in the perfect way that it knows how." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The reason we hang onto self-defeating behaviors is because it's easier not to take responsibility." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"There is a voice in the Universe urging us to remember our purpose for being on this great Earth. This is the voice of inspiration, which is within each and every one of us." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"There is no such thing as a well-adjusted slave." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"You must become the producer, director and actor in the unfolding story of your life." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"As long as we feel ourselves to be an object, or think we are such (and a 'self' is an object): that is bondage." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"Late in the night I pay the unrest I own to the life that has never lived and cannot live now. What the world could be is my good dream and my agony when, dreaming it, I lie awake and turn and look into the dark. I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and grace of necessary things, not in frivolity. That would heal the earth, and heal men. But the end, too, is part of the pattern, the last labor of the heart: to learn to lie still, one with the earth again, and let the world go." - Wendell Berry

"Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well." - Wendell Berry

"Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Slowly we are learning, we at least know this much, that we have to unlearn much that we were taught, and are growing chary of emphatic dogmas; Love like Matter is much odder than we thought." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone

"To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge - knowledge for leadership of transformation." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

"The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith

"It is quite natural that if a child of limited intelligence can only do one subject, that subject should be arithmetic. The judgments involved in thinking, "Is this the right block? No, that one's too long," and later associating the various blocks with 0, 1, 2, ...., and 9 are much simpler than those required to learn the 26 letters of the alphabet and the eccentricities of English and American spelling." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"The first duty of a teacher is not to talk but to listen; to try to understand the direction the energies of each pupil are taking and not to expect activity in places that Energy has yet to reach." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"Description is revelation. It is not the thing described, nor false facsimile. It is an artificial thing that exists, in its own seeming, plainly visible, yet not too closely the double of our lives, intenser than any actual life could be." - Wallace Stevens

"That scrawny cry—it was a chorister whose C preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, surrounded by its choral rings, still far away. It was like a new knowledge of reality." - Wallace Stevens

"If you ask me what I think people should be getting next season. I'll tell you what I'd like them to buy—nothing. I'd like people to stop buying and buying and buying..." - Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire

"A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part o? nous ne serons jamais s?par?s; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn--even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Moreover, the slogan "highbrows and lowbrows, unite!", which he had spouted already, is all wrong since true highbrows are highbrows because they do not unite." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"One is always at home in one's past." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death we're a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then not in dreams but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and it's castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"For great things do not done (sic) just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"There is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"What I like so much about painting is that with the same amount of trouble which one takes over a drawing, one brings home something that conveys the impression much better and is much more pleasant to look at … it is more gratifying than drawing. But it is absolutely necessary to be able to draw the right proportion and the position of the object pretty correctly before one begins. If one makes mistakes in this, the whole thing comes to nothing." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers ... Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft in the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf