Great Throughts Treasury

"Every man dies; not every man really lives."

"Maybe the gift of any great person is the power to converse with our own hearts."

"All of us are made in a miraculous way, that to live at all is a miracle. To love is an even greater one. It is love that makes the normal extraordinary."

"Freedom had always been the holy grail of my life"

"I found myself wondering about her as I wondered about myself. Who are we really? Are we who we are at our worst, or at our best?"

"I soared above the song birds and never heard them sing. I lived my life in winter and then you brought the spring"

"Hollywood For Habitat For Humanity gave me a chance to get my hands dirty and my heart clean."

"Freedom and rules don?t go together well."

"In the large industrial cities, God is money. Doesn?t matter how you got it."

"If there is anything in life I know to be true, it is that life itself is a matter of the spirit. A man with a broken spirit, whose soul nourished nothing except the belief that the poison within his own heart is shared by the whole human race, and hopes anything beyond the desire that everyone he meets will share in his misery, is sick indeed, and his body, however healthy in its potential, is on a path toward corruption; but the person with a purpose, warmed by the impression that, for all his other shortcomings, something resides within him that is capable of loving and of being loved, can bear all things, believe all things, endure all things. That person's body will heal faster than medical minds imagine. It will overcome pain; in many cases, it will not feel it at all."

"If you ever knew what person held as God you would know something about that person."

"In Hollywood, God is celebrity. Whatever you did to get famous, even if it?s nothing, you?re praised."

"Money is not the only thing to give."

"Some men were born with their freedom. I had the privilege of winning mine."

"Secretariat certainly goes with the quality of sacrifice, but with this story is about pure joy. This celebrates the victory of love prevailing. The horse loved to run. He loved being alive. He loved using the gifts that he had. The woman who owned him (Penny Chenery Tweedy) had to do that, too, against the challenges of other people who didn't believe that she could do what she did. I found that inspiring. It captured me."

"Rafe made people find something in themselves...(he) made me dream, he saw what I could hope to be, and helped me hope it. He did that to everyone he knew - especially the ones he knew the best. - Danny"

"Somehow I felt better toward him, knowing that he had possessed some instinct to fight back. It was something I needed to believe - that all men possess, somewhere, the dignity to value their own lives. If only enough to scratch the arm of the one who throws you to the wolves."

"The dreams are not torture. They often begin with an elation unlike any I have experience in life. The anguish comes on as I feel this happiness receding, and I struggle to keep it, and lost it, and grieve. Whether I weep openly each time, I don't know. But then I didn't know before how much I might show to anyone who saw me when these dreams take me."

"The joy of giving creates the magnificent obsession to give again."

"The ghosts of my heart strolled in."

"The secret was giving in secret."

"There's just nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer."

"The take-away I would like the audience to have is not just to live, but to live passionately; to live with joy and exuberance."

"War is a farmer?s son from Kansas trying to kill a factory worker?s son from Berlin, with neither of them knowing why."

"The purist purpose is heart. I don't think of this movie as containing my personal dogma or my personal doctrine. My faith isn't built on my own understanding of things. My faith is built on the idea that, or on the experience that, life is greater than I can imagine it to be. The way I understand God is that God is not within my explanation or understanding. So I don't try to convince someone of my particular way of looking at things, but I think by affirming that courage matters and hope prevails and love works. I am saying that I am being the truest to what I believe, and I am also reaching across boundaries to connect what I really do believe with others. It's sort of like what John Wesley said, "Let's not argue if our heads are together. If our hearts are together, let's join hands." This is a movie from my heart."

"We all know somehow, instinctively hard-wired to say, ?Standing here at the risk of my life is more important than what happens in my little life. Standing here in this life I?m standing here in the heart of God.?"

"We hope and dream; somewhere we find faith. Then doubt spreads through us as a dark liquid stream, fed not so much by the world outside us but through some source within our own souls. Faith and doubt appear in our lives like two visitors - coming uninvited and leaving at their whim. We feed them both, and when they leave us by ourselves we remember the voice of each and ask which one spoke our true hearts - when both did."

"When we give we tend to judge the person we?re giving to."