Great Throughts Treasury

"Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Has become my thoughts more like neighbors veterans, annoying, but they have become dear, there is room for all of us in this neighborhood." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Was it Mom and Dad's fault?( Was it just temporal, a 'bad time' in my life? (When the divorce ends will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine—just imagine!—what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I would say that if you really want to STOP knowing someone, you have to divorce him." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: I want a spiritual teacher." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"People think a soul mate is someone who fits perfectly into one, and that is what all desire. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything you inhibits the shows you who you are so that you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because he tears down thy walls, and slaps you until you wake up." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me and tell me that you did." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The culture of Rome just doesn't match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I've decided that Rome and Yoga don't have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word toga." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"When you set out in the world to help yourself, sometimes you end up helping Tutti." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I play the Demon myself -- no puppets involved." - Elizabeth Kenny

"If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame." - Elizabeth Lesser

"Whatever's lost, it first was won; we will not struggle nor impugn. Perhaps the cup was broken here, that Heaven's new wine might show more clear. I praise Thee while my days go on." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!" - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom." - Dorothy Parker

"I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Angels from the Lord lead and protect us every moment and every moment of every moment." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"Only they have to weep bitter tears who know what has come to them is the result of their foolish conduct, their ignorant way, their want of proper understanding of life and what love means." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

"The man in power gives up his peace." - Émile Souvestre

"My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit." - Emile Zola

"How happy is the little stone that rambles in the road alone, and doesn't care about careers, and exigencies never fears; whose coat of elemental brown a passing universe put on; and independent as the sun, associates or glows alone, fulfilling absolute decree in casual simplicity." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Only two pointed arrows betrayal of violence is similar to injure users of worse enemies." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Supply yourself with a mental equivalent, and the thing must come to you." - Emmet Fox

"Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. With "smart" technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says that "people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless," he is not wrong: This is the future we're headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there. A more humane smart-design paradigm would happily acknowledge that the task of technology is not to liberate us from problem-solving. Rather, we need to enroll smart technology in helping us with problem-solving. What we want is not a life where friction and frustrations have been carefully designed out, but a life where we can overcome the frictions and frustrations that stand in our way. Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. Unless designers of smart technologies take stock of the complexity and richness of the lived human experience—with its gaps, challenges and conflicts—their inventions will be destined for the SmartBin of history." - Evgeny Morozov

"But what does he do to qualify as a sonovabitch? Jenny asked. Make me, I replied. Beg pardon? Make me, I repeated. Her eyes widened like saucers. You mean like incest? she asked. Don’t give me your family problems, Jen. I have enough of my own. Like what, Oliver? she asked, like just what is it he makes you do? The ‘right things’, I said. What’s wrong with the ‘right things’? she asked, delighting in the apparent paradox." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"A nation is a body of people who have done great things together." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan

"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When the winter began, the rain became permanent, and the rain came the cholera. But it was dominated, and only killed seven thousand men of the army." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Pollution must be brought under control and mankind's population and consumption of resources must be steered towards a permanent and sustainable equilibrium." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"There is a Life Stream that flows to you, and this is a Stream of clarity, a Stream of wellness, a Stream of abundance - and in any moment, you are allowing it or not. What someone else does with the Stream, or not, does not have anything to do with how much of it will be left for you." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"The kind human gain much that that the virtue was less laborious." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one." - Eugenio Montale

"The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards (i.e., everything is turned topsy turvy.)" - Euripedes NULL

"Good deeds remain good, no matter whether we know how the world was made or not. Vile deeds are vile, no matter whether we know or do not know what, after death, will be the fate of the doer. We know, at least, what his fate is now, namely, to be wedded to the vileness. The question for anyone to decide, who hesitates between good and evil, is whether he aspires to be a full-weight man, or merely the fragment, nay, the counterfeit of a man. Only he who ceaselessly aims at moral completeness is, in the true sense, a human being." - Felix Adler

"It?s hard to communicate anything exactly and that?s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find." - Gustave Flaubert

"Nothing ventured nothing gained." - Italian Proverbs

"I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't 0even be here. But we are.It's like in the great stories, Mister Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they we're. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien