Great Throughts Treasury

"What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?' No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every men would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged." - Emma Goldman

"There is a truly spiritual mode of communication from which nothing but good can come. It is this: Sit down quietly and remind yourself that the one God really is Omnipresent. Then reflect that your real self is in the Presence of God now, and that the real selves of others are also in the Presence of God. Do this for a few minutes every day, and sooner or later you will get a sense of communication." - Emmet Fox

"A word is enough to the wise." - English Proverbs

"There is the type of man who has great contempt for "im­mediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and with­draws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this unique­ness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and man­kind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate." - Ernest Becker

"We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself." - Ernest Becker

"How much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I wondered... if there should be anything wrong with Sen. Joe McCarthy (Republican) of Wisconsin which a .577 solid would not cure." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"She's vicious,' Miss Stein said. 'She's truly vicious, so she can never be happy except with new people. She corrupts people." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance." - Esther Perel

"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page." - Eudora Welty

"If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. And now among other things they are urging you to "cultivate" war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The business and method of mysticism is love." - Evelyn Underhill

"IÂ’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I canÂ’t shut myself out from His mercy." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Some many heads, so many brains." - Italian Proverbs

"The difficult thing is to get foot in the stirrup." -