Great Throughts Treasury

"It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness." - English Proverbs

"It's better to travel hopefully than to arrive." - English Proverbs

"'Tis money that begets money." - English Proverbs

"There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common: None was started by one person." - Ernesto Sirolli

"Programs are often borne in ideology. [An ideology that] the poor are entrepreneurs, or they are starving or they are slothful. [Programs] are conceived in ignorance of the reality of the field, and then they persist because once they exist there is a consistency for them to just continue. I think we need to fight against that." - Esther Duflo

"Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. With "smart" technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says that "people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless," he is not wrong: This is the future we're headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there. A more humane smart-design paradigm would happily acknowledge that the task of technology is not to liberate us from problem-solving. Rather, we need to enroll smart technology in helping us with problem-solving. What we want is not a life where friction and frustrations have been carefully designed out, but a life where we can overcome the frictions and frustrations that stand in our way. Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. Unless designers of smart technologies take stock of the complexity and richness of the lived human experience—with its gaps, challenges and conflicts—their inventions will be destined for the SmartBin of history." - Evgeny Morozov

"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong." - Eric S. Raymond

"The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network." - Eric S. Raymond

"I was afraid of being rejected, yes. I was also afraid of being accepted for the wrong reasons." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you." - Erin McKean

"sometimes, it seems to me that, the smaller the things is that people want, the bigger the disappointment when they don't get it, or it's not exactly right -dora" - Erin McKean

"Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan

"And that was the end of the beginning of that" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"But, thank God, [the fish] are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Every true story ends in death." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I sin?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I had an inheritance from my father, it was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, the spending of itÂ’s never done." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I had gone... to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"They would hit a man in the water, if they were hungry, even if the man had no smell of fish blood nor of fish slime on him." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Revolutionaries filling the world banging for the world to not sleep weighed on the bodies of the poor." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called “educated classes" are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

"In his urgent attempt to obtain reliable knowledge about his essentially indeterminate future, the modern man of action may surround himself by ever-growing armies of forecasters, by ever-growing mountains of factual data to be digested by ever more wonderful mechanical contrivances: I fear that the result is little more than a huge game of make-believe and an ever more marvelous vindication of Parkinson's Law. The best decisions will still be based on the judgments of mature non-electronic brains possessed by men who have looked steadily and calmly at the situation and seen it whole." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"To mention these things, no doubt, means laying oneself open to the charge of being against science, technology, and progress. Let me therefore, in conclusion, add a few words about future scientific research. Man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live against nature." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Children coming forth today have a greater capacity to deal with the greater variety of information that is coming forth than you did." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"See this world as a free world, and see everyone in it as trying, through their individual experiences, to find their way back to that calling, back to that Source Energy. And even though there are billions of them going about it in a way that is different than you would choose, there's no right or wrong way. In other words, bless them all, and get on with the only thing you have any power about, which is opening or closing your vortex to your natural state of Well-Being." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"You don't have to work at being in the high vibration that is natural to you, because it is natural to you. But you do have to stop holding the thoughts that cause you to lower your vibration. It's a matter of no longer giving your attention to things that don't allow your cork to float or don't allow you to vibrate in harmony with who you really are." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"A good name is better than good perfume." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"A home without a woman is like a barn without cattle." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"Eat when the food is ready; speak when the time is right." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"It is easy to become a monk in oneÂ’s old age." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"No one knows what the dawn will bring." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers." - Eudora Welty

"And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"A genius with the IQ of a moron." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"English is his third language and some of us were thinking about getting up a fund and sending him back to Berlitz for the remainder of the English language course." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Child labor must be abolished by the working class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs