Great Throughts Treasury

"Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"Atheist: A name given by theologians to whoever differs from them in their ideas concerning the divinity, or who refuses to believe in it in the form of which, in the emptiness of their infallible pates, they have resolved to present it to him. As a rule an Atheist is any or every man who does not believe in the God of the Priest." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing." - Victor Hugo

"The balanced persons will be active because it is their duty. They will not be agitated by anything - failure or success. The Godly will take up activity as a means of worshipping God; and they leave the result to God. They know that they are but instruments in the hands of God." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Excessive distrust is not less hurtful than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is unwilling to risk being deceived." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"It cannot be right if it is not human." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"To possess taste, one must have some soul." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Nature and revelation are alike God's books; each may have mysteries, but in each there are plain practical lessons for everyday duty." - Tryon Edwards

"When Hume and Adam Smith prophesied that a little increase of national debt beyond the then amount of it, would probably occasion bankruptcy; the main cause of their error was the natural one, of not being able to see the vast increase of productive power to which the nation would subsequently obtain." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"Of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"Such is the infatuation of self-love, that, though in the general doctrine of the vanity of the world all men agree, yet almost every one flatters himself that his own case is it to be an exception from the common rule." - Hugh Blair

"Okay, we have just passed through the Michener zone, and , assuming that narcolepsy hasn’t leadened our lids, that we’ve not been Lao-this’d and Lao-that’ed into a comatose state, we’re now in a position, as we rejoin the narrative flow, to conclude that Fan Nan Nan was a Lao Theung community. Are we not?" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon than love that would seem hid; love's night is noon. Twelfth Night, Act iii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Appear thou in the likeness of sigh; Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied! Cry but 'Ay me! pronounce but 'love' and 'dove': Speak to my gossip Venus one fair word, One nickname for her purblind son and heir Young Abraham Cupid, he that shot so true When King Cophetus loved the beggar maid! Romeo and Juliet, Act ii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"AUTOLYCUS: I am a poor fellow, sir. CAMILLO: Why, be so still; here's nobody will steal that from thee." - William Shakespeare

"Because I will not do the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; I will live a bachelor." - William Shakespeare

"Create her child of spleen; that it may live, and be a thwart disnatured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, with cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks, King Lear, Act I, Scene 4" - William Shakespeare

"Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him." - William Godwin

"If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white." - William James

"Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God." - William Law

"What seems generosity is often disguised ambition, that despises small to run after greater interests." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Thus, through conjunction with the Self (purusha), the insentient seems to be sentient, and though the agency really belongs to the gunas, the neutral stranger appears as if it were active." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

"Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment" - Edwin Percy Whipple

"That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them." - Dorothy Parker

"What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?" - Emil M. Cioran

"Angelique, with both hands open, lying limply on her knees, was giving herself. And Felicien remembered the evening on which she had run barefoot through the grass, so adorable that he had pursued her, and whispered in her ear, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you, the eternal cry that had finally emerged from her wide-open heart. I love you... Take me, carry me away, I am yours." - Emile Zola

"He loved her body so far. Now head began to love." - Emile Zola

"When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible." - Ernest Becker

"I was blown up while we were eating cheese." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo's head, drowned in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam's brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master's breast. Peace was in both their faces. Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee--but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien