Great Throughts Treasury

"I’m learning the difference between humor and comedy, between the laugh that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. Humor is giving, and comedy is taking away. Humor is companionable, comedy cold. Humor is character, comedy personality."

"A library should be like a pair of open arms."

"Anyone who lives in the future languishes in the present"

"Anytime you make a person into something other than himself, you make a monster."

"Blame is especially useful in situations in which there is no apparent villain-those moments that prove, despite our advancement of learning, how susceptible we are to high winds and wet roads."

"Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream."

"Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death--that is, they attempt suicide--twice as often as men, though men are more "successful" because they use surer weapons, like guns."

"Do not keep company with people who speak of careers. Not only are such people uninteresting in themselves; they also have no interest in anything interesting. . . . Keep company with people who are interested in the world outside themselves. The one who never asks you what you are working on; who never inquires as to the success of your latest project; who never uses the word career as a noun -- he is your friend."

"For those at home, as well as for those in battle, war is curiously disabling. The mere realization that one's country is at war poisons the bloodstream, creates an incessant mood of worry that infiltrates even the most casual moments."

"One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world."

"I realized these people had been writing what they wanted to write their whole lives."

"The question was, whether or not it would be possible to expand these community health centers if there wasn't anybody there to staff them."

"If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen."

"Just because the person who criticizes you is an idiot doesn't make him wrong."

"The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief."

"There may be no more pleasing picture in the world than that of a child peering into a book - the past and the future entrancing each other."

"The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves."

"There is no cure for grief. Is this a message that can be delivered, much less absorbed?"

"Time can be such a menace to a man. By this age do that; by that age do better."

"Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and it will add decades to your life."

"Uncle Scrooge preferred to let the poor die "and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge may not have had God on his side, but his arithmetic was impeccable."

"Why do we write? To make suffering endurable. To make evil intelligible. To make justice desirable and"