Great Throughts Treasury

"Purity of speech, of the mind, of the senses, and of a compassionate heart are needed by one who desires to rise to the divine platform." - Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL

"Now For self-culture nothing equals respect for others. To counteract firmness nothing equals compliance. Consequently it can be said that the Way of respect and acquiescence is woman's most important principle of conduct. So respect may be defined as nothing other than holding on to that which is permanent; and acquiescence nothing other than being liberal and generous. Those who are steadfast in devotion know that they should stay in their proper places; those who are liberal and generous esteem others, and honor and serve chem." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"The laughter which it creates is impish and devilish, the very mirth of fiends, and its wit the gleam and glare of infernal light." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. A few hundred, she said. How do you have the time? he asked, gobsmacked. She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading! I don't know, she said, shrugging." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

"There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight." - Elias Canetti

"What is the point of Roaming the world When it's the Same Everywhere misery?" - Elif Safak

"When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another." - Elif Safak

"Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Measure not the work until the day's out and the labour done, then bring your gauges." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burdens." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets." - Dorothy Parker

"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true." - Dorothy Parker

"I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that anymore." - Dorothy Parker

"Little Words when you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; and I can only stare, and shape my grief in little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown the bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, no beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, can spell them out." - Dorothy Parker

"You think you're frightening me with your hell, don't you? You think Yyur hell is worse than mine." - Dorothy Parker

"Only they have to weep bitter tears who know what has come to them is the result of their foolish conduct, their ignorant way, their want of proper understanding of life and what love means." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

"Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to scape that awakening..." - Emil M. Cioran

"I'm happiest when most away I can bear my soul from its home of clay on a windy night when the moon is bright aAnd the eye can wander through worlds of light— when I am not and none beside— nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky—but only spirit wandering wide through infinite immensity." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Nay, you'll be ashamed of me every day of your life, he answered; and the more ashamed, the more you know me; and I cannot bide it." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"If to be means to exist the way nature does, then everything which is given as refractory to the categories and to the mode of existence of nature will, as such, have no objectivity and will be, a priori and unavoidably, reduced to something natural." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but trouble has come to you because you are depressed. You can change your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will come to correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working." - Emmet Fox

"As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am" - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"For part of it is the smell that comes when, on a ship, there is a storm and the portholes are closed up. Put your nose against the brass handle of a screwed-tight porthole on a rolling ship that is swaying under you so that you are faint and hollow in the stomach and you have a part of that smellÂ… After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toldedo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of a bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her Ingles, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made ofÂ… Kiss one, Pilar said. Kiss one, Ingles, for thy knowledgeÂ’s sake and then, with this in thy nostrils, walk back up into the city and when thous seest a refuse pail with dead flowers [chrysanthemums] in it plunge thy nose deep into it and inhale so that scent mixes with those thou hast already in thy nasal passagesÂ… Then, Pilar went on, it is important that the day be in the autumn with rain, or at least some fog, or early winter even and now thou shouldst continue to walk through the city and down the Called de Salud smelling what thou wilt smell where they are sweeping out the casas de putas and emptying the slop jars into the drains and, with this odor of loveÂ’s labor lost mixed sweetly with soapy water and cigarette butts only faintly reaching thy nostrils, thou shouldst go on to the Jardin Botanico where at night those girls who can no longer work in the houses do their work against the iron gates of the park and the iron picketed fences and upon the sidewalks. It is there in the shadow of the trees against the iron railing that they will perform all that a man wishes; from the simplest requests at a remuneration of ten centimos up to a peseta for that great act that we are born to and there, on a dead flower bed that has not yet been plucked out and replanted, and so serves to soften the earth that is so much softer than the sidewalk, thou wilt find an abandoned gunny sack with the odor of the wet earth, the dead flowers, and the doings of that night. In this sack will be contained the essence of it all, both the dead earth and the dead stalks of the flowers and their rotted blooms and the smell that is both the death and birth of man. Thou wild wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe through it. No. Yes, Pilar said. Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breath and then, if thou hast not lost any of the previous odors, when thou inhalest deeply, thou wilt smell the odor of death-to-come as we know it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good dayÂ’s work." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms." - Eudora Welty

"I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end." - Eudora Welty

"IÂ’m a short-story writer who writes novels the hard way, and by accident. You see, all my work grows out of the work itself. It seems to set its form from the idea, which is complete from the start, and a sense of the form is like a vase into which you pour something and fill it up. I have that completely in mind from the beginning, and I donÂ’t realize how far I can wander and yet come back." - Eudora Welty

"It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction." - Eudora Welty

"After midlife, one falls back on C G Jung and determines that the first years of life were in themselves symbolic." - Eugen Drewermann

"I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business." - Eugene Peterson

"Our Lord gave us the image of a child, not because of the childÂ’s helplessness, but because of the childÂ’s willingness to be led, to be taught, to be blessed." - Eugene Peterson

"Keep on writing, no matter what! That's the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven't much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Howard's eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"You can also offer your prayers, obedience, and endurance of dryness to Our Lord, for the good of other souls, and then you have practiced intercession. Never mind if it all seems for the time very second-hand. The less you get out of it, the nearer it approaches to being something worth offering; and the humiliation of not being able to feel as devout as we want to be, is excellent for most of us. Use vocal prayer... very slowly, trying to realize the meaning with which it is charged and remember that... you are only a unit in the Chorus of the Church, so that the others will make good the shortcomings you cannot help." - Evelyn Underhill

"A necklace of pearls on a white neck. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down... the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh