Great Throughts Treasury

"A book might be written on the injustice of the just." - Anthony Hope, fully Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins

"And never was as formidable as after spending days in his chair, lost in his improvisations and his old books." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Take a stress pill and think things over-- HAL in 2001" - Stanley Kubrick

"The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, '2001' shows that what some people call 'god' is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call 'god' -Stanley Kubrick, interview, 1963" - Stanley Kubrick

"These people are comfortable with authority from above," - Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL

"Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day." - Stephan Jay Gould

"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

"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually turned over to become the first vertebrates (for the classical statement of the inversion theory, see William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, 1920)." - Stephan Jay Gould

"All the evidence shows that God was actually quite a gambler, and the universe is a great casino, where dice are thrown, and roulette wheels spin on every occasion. Over a large number of bets, the odds even out and we can make predictions; that's why casino owners are so rich. But over a very small number of rolls of the dice, the uncertainty principle is very important." - Stephen Hawking

"My dreams at the time were rather disturbed. Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do, if I were reprieved. Another dream that I had several times was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I were going to die anyway, it might as well do some good." - Stephen Hawking

"Reports in magazine articles that I drank heavily are an exaggeration. I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner." - Stephen Hawking

"The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified." - Stephen Hawking

"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

"Pause now to ask yourself the following question: "Am I dreaming or awake, right now?" Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer." - Stephen LaBerge

"When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, and our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit, and what matters becomes instantly apparent: the transmission of love; the letting go of obstacles to understanding; the relinquishment of our grasping, of our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. If we take each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy as it arises and experience it fully, life becomes workable. We are no longer a victim of life. And then every experience, even the loss of our dearest one, becomes another opportunity for awakening." - Stephen Levine

"Words and thoughts concerning compassionate action that are not put into practice are like beautiful flowers that are colorful but have no fragrance." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"It is a brave act of valor to condemn death, but where life is more terrible than death it is then the truest valor to dare to live." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne

"It seems to me a great truth that human things cannot stand on selfishness, mechanical utilities, economies and law courts; that if there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable, and doomed to ruin." - Thomas Carlyle

"You cannot add to the peace and good will of the world if you fail to create an atmosphere of harmony and love right where you live and work." - Thomas Dreier

"The cry of distress lays hold of our Lord's omnipotence. It is as easy for God to supply thy greatest as thy smallest wants, even as it was within His power to form a system or an atom, to create a blazing sun as to kindle the fire-fly's lamp." - Thomas Guthrie

"Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line -- less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all." - Thomas Hardy

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever." - Thomas Jefferson

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony." - Thomas Merton

"I am earth, earth. My heart's love bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air in which my own appointed place, field and valley stand reflected" - Thomas Merton

"If a God, he could not suffer death, for immortality cannot die, and as a man his death could be no more than the death of any other person." - Thomas Paine

"If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them." - Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey

"Every duty, even the least duty, involves the whole principle of obedience. " - Henry Edward Manning

"The Angel at the Ford - I sought to hold her, but within her eyes I read a new strange meaning; faint they prayed, “Oh, let me pass and taste the great surprise; Behold me not reluctant nor afraid!” “Nay, I will strive with God for this!” I cried, “As man with man, like Jacob at the brook, Only be thou, dear heart, upon my side!” “Be still,” she answered, “very still, and look!” And straightway I discerned with inward dread The multitudinous passing of white souls, Who paused, each one with sad averted head, And flashing of indignant aureoles." - W. J. Dawson. fully William James Dawson

"My eight years in Brooklyn gave me a new vision of America, or rather America gave me a new vision of a part of itself, Brooklyn. They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people, proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geographical, social, emotional status as a city apart and alone and sufficient. One could not live for eight years in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club, such as no other city in America equaled. Call it loyalty, and so it was. It would be a crime against a community of three million people to move the Dodgers. Not that the move was unlawful, since people have the right to do as they please with their property. But a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the quasi." - Wesley Branch Rickey

"A Song : On The Green Margin - On the green margin of the brook, Despairing Phyllida reclined, Whilst every sigh, and every look, Declared the anguish of her mind. Am I less lovely then? (she cries, And in the waves her form surveyed); Oh yes, I see my languid eyes, My faded cheek, my colour fled: These eyes no more like lightning pierced, These cheeks grew pale, when Damon first His Phyllida betrayed. The rose he in his bosom wore, How oft upon my breast was seen! And when I kissed the drooping flower, Behold, he cried, it blooms again! The wreaths that bound my braided hair, Himself next day was proud to wear At church, or on the green. While thus sad Phyllida lamented, Chance brought unlucky Thyrsis on; Unwillingly the nymph consented, But Damon first the cheat begun. She wiped the fallen tears away, Then sighed and blushed, as who would say Ah! Thyrsis, I am won. " - William Cowper

"The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not." - Willem de Kooning

"His frown was full of terror, and his voice shook the delinquent with such fits of awe as left him not, till penitence had won lost favor back again, and clos'd the breach." - William Cowper

"Then, shifting his side (as a lawyer knows how)." - William Cowper

"It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"Even if you are on the right track, but just sit there, you will still get run over." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I would love to see Mr. (Henry) Ford in there, really. I don't know who started the idea that a President must be a Politician instead of a Business man. A Politician can't run any other kind of business. So there is no reason why he can run the U.S. That's the biggest single business in the World." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"If this depression stays with us, the loser Tuesday is going to be the winner." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!" - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?" - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"That [haunting fear of being wrong] is the fate of those who break without knowing clearly that Communism is wrong because something else is right, because to the challenge: God or Man?, they continue to give the answer: Man… They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be witnesses for anything." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"To my ninth decade I have tottered on, and no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; she, who once led me where she would, is gone, so when he calls me, Death shall find me ready." - Walter Savage Landor

"For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species." - Washington Irving