Great Throughts Treasury

"In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister."

"In the nightmare of the dark - All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate"

"In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me laugh."

"In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag."

"Into this neutral air where blind skyscrapers use their full height to proclaim the strength of Collective Man, each language pours its vain competitive excuse."

"It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful."

"It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction."

"It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ."

"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."

"It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.'"

"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen."

"It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940.""

"It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, in the position of having almost infinitely free will."

"It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient."

"Just as I'm picking my nose?"

"Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer."

"Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before."

"Lastly by the classical apotheosis of Man-God, Augustine oppose the Christian belief in Jesus Christ, the God-Man. The former is a Hercules who compels recognition by the great deeds he does in establishing for the common people in the law, order and prosperity they cannot establish for themselves, by his manifestation of superior power; the latter reveals to fallen man that God is love by suffering, i.e. by refusing to compel recognition, choosing instead to be a victim of man's self-love. The idea of a sacrificial victim is not new; but that it should be the victim who chooses to be sacrificed, and the sacrificers who deny that any sacrifice has been made, is very new."

"Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful."

"Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbor completely."

"Learn from your dreams what you lack."

"Leave a clear place in the consciousness."

"Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done."

"Let all your thinks be thanks."

"Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think."

"Let mortals beware of words for with words we lie can speak peace when we mean war but song is true let music for peace be the paradigm for peace means change at the right time"

"Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one"

"Let us then consider rather the incessant Now of the traveler through time, his tired mind biased towards bigness since his body must exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope."

"Life is a picnic on a precipice."

"Like everyone else, I have my black list of unfavorite authors and critics, and among intimate friends I sometimes say exactly what I think of them, but I have the feeling that to express my opinions publicly would be in bad taste, that, to people whom one does not know personally, one should speak only of the authors and critics one is fond of. I find reading savage reviews like reading pornography; though I often enjoy them, I feel a bit ashamed of myself for doing so. Still, I must admit that I find Nietzsche's list of his impracticals great fun."

"Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate."

"Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books."

"Look, stranger, on this island now the leaping light for your delight discovers, stand stable here and silent be, that through the channels of the ear may wander like a river the swaying sound of the sea."

"Love each other or perish."

"Love made him weep his pints like you and me."

"Lovers of small numbers go benignly potty, believe all tales are thirteen chapters long, have animal doubles, carry pentagrams, are Millerites, Baconians, Flat-Earth-Men. Lovers of big numbers go horribly mad, would have the Swiss abolished, all of us well-purged, somatotyped, baptised, taught baseball: they empty bars, spoil parties, run for Congress."

"Machines have no political opinions, but they have profound political effects. They demand a strict regimentation of time, and, by abolishing the need for manual skill, have transformed the majority of the population from workers into laborers. There are, that is to say, fewer and fewer jobs which a man can find a pride and satisfaction in doing well, more and more which have no interest in themselves and can be valued only for the money they provide."

"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."

"Make her head - sleeping, loved, Human - on my shoulder unbelievers, in thinking children hurried flame consumes time magnificence, given to each of them differently, and eats them with fear, but I want to dawn in the arms have a living creature, full of blame, unstable, deadly, but for me a beautiful finish. Beyond Borders is the soul and body lovers, when in a swoon Conocnym lair under the supervision Gentle Venus, her brilliance sends visions of unstable omnipotent love, images of Hope forever high, Dreams, in the abstract version of waking and skinny breasts Hermit sensual ecstasy. Certainty, fidelity does not last even a day - go out before midnight as the voice of the bell fading, fashionable geeks will rise again his pedantic outcry and divination cards prostrate us: You have to pay back every penny costs, debts and bills, but the treasure night kisses Values ??in the morning did not lose. Beauty, midnight, delusions - Everything disappears, let the wind dawn Above your head, a dream, wake up a day so full of light, By sight and pulse paean sung the world was rushing to death, and you will find the desert day by Manna involuntary , find and insult the night Love all human hearts."

"Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself."

"Marriage is rarely bliss but, surely it would be worse as particles to pelt at thousands of miles per sec about a universe in which a lover's kiss would either not be felt or break the loved one's neck."

"May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?"

"Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores"

"Miles and miles of golden moss, silently and very fast."

"Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic."

"Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them."

"Most people are even less original in their dreaming than in their waking life; their dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more literary."

"Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is."

"Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts."

"Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession."