Great Throughts Treasury

"Poetry is the history of the human heart, and it continues to record the history of human emotion, whether it's celebration or grief or whatever it may be." - William Collins

"All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"O western orb sailing the heaven, now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walked, as I walked in silence the transparent shadowy night," - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,) to cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The survival rate of the newly planted trees has reached 90 percent." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup." - Wendell Berry

"The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking." - Wendell Berry

"I will love you forever swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday - Is that still as easy?" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement." - Walker Percy

"Funest philosophers and ponderers, their evocations are the speech of clouds." - Wallace Stevens

"It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather to make him return to people, to find among them whatever it was that he found in their absence, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation." - Wallace Stevens

"One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, when it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges the crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent." - 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

"The great ship, Balayne, lay frozen in the sea. The one-foot stars were couriers of its death to the wild limits of its habitation. These were not tepid stars of torpid places but bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces, they looked back at Hans' look with savage faces." - Wallace Stevens

"The poem is the cry of its occasion, part of the res itself and not about it." - Wallace Stevens

"The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." - Wallace Stevens

"The poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice. It has not always had to find: the scene was set; it repeated what was in the script. Then the theatre was changed to something else. Its past was a souvenir." - Wallace Stevens

"The poem refreshes life so that we share, for a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies belief in an immaculate beginning and sends us, winged by an unconscious will, to an immaculate end. We move between these points: from that ever-early candor to its late plural." - Wallace Stevens

"The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain - There it was, word for word, the poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed a place to go to in his own direction. How he had recomposed the pines, shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds for the outlook that would be right, where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: the exact rock where his inexactness would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, recognize his unique and solitary home." - Wallace Stevens

"The poem, through candor, brings back a power again that gives a candid kind to everything." - Wallace Stevens

"The reason can give nothing at all like the response to desire." - Wallace Stevens

"There will never be an end to this droning of the surf." - Wallace Stevens

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most pernicious inclinations, is there anything more foolish for wanting to continuously bring a burden that we would always throw down? To have a horror of their lives and hold on to their existence? In short, to caress the serpent that devours us, until we have eaten my heart?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It seems unspeakably important that all persons among us, and especially the student and the writer, should be pervaded with Americanism. Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are steadily establishing it here. It includes the faith that to this good thing all other good things must in time be added. When a man is heartily imbued with such a national sentiment as this, it is as marrow in his bones and blood in his veins. He may still need culture, but he has the basis of all culture. He is entitled to an imperturbable patience and hopefulness, born of a living faith. All that is scanty in our intellectual attainments, or poor in our artistic life, may then be cheerfully endured: if a man sees his house steadily rising on sure foundations, he can wait or let his children wait for the cornice and the frieze. But if one happens to be born or bred in America without this wholesome confidence, there is no happiness for him; he has his alternative between being unhappy at home and unhappy abroad; it is a choice of martyrdoms for himself, and a certainty of martyrdom for his friends." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it" - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The maple tree that night without a wind or rain let go its leaves because its time had come." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

"The inspiration often seems like a tarantula bite him, shake him from sleep atavistic and in those moments it is impossible to write better than him, with far more cunning, with the most perfect taste." - Eugenio Montale

"Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly