Great Throughts Treasury

"To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"May you be more advanced in the school of solid virtue, which is practiced in an excellent way in the midst of suffering, and which keeps good servants of God in fear when they have nothing to suffer!" - Saint Vincent de Paul

"There is nothing good that does not meet with opposition, and it should not be valued any less because it encounters objections." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"Your soul will be blessed, Sister, if you bear patiently the troubles of mind and body His Providence sends you, or which come to you from within and without." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse. The offenders acquire impunity by increasing their ravaging." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL

"I know of one means only by which to attain to perfection: LOVE. Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else. Sometimes I seek another word to express Love, but in this land of exile the word which begins and ends (St. Augustine) is quite incapable of rendering the vibrations of the soul; we must then adhere to this simple and only word: TO LOVE." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"Our Lord's love makes itself seen quite as much in the simplest of souls as in the most highly gifted, as long as there is no resistance offered to his grace." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"When I die, I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens,I will spend my heaven by doing good on earth." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"The creation, in the world and above the world, that once was at variance with itself, is knit together in friendship: and we ... are made to join in the angels' song, offering the worship of their praise." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

"I approached each speech draft as if it might someday appear under Kennedy's name in a collection of the world's great speeches." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Working women have the same need to protection that working men have; the ballot is as necessary for one class as to the other; we do not believe that with the two sexes there is identity of function; but we do believe there should be equality of right." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The worth of a wife is a man's good fortune; his jewels are his good children." - Thiruvalluvar NULL

"It doesn't mean necessarily that we are going to strike ... but it certainly gives us more flexibility in terms of how we proceed." - Thomas Dewar, Lord Dewar, fully Thomas Robert "Tommy" Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar

"It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you—try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself!" - Thomas Merton

"One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favor of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right." - Thomas Merton

"We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world." - Thomas Merton

"Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"Discourse may want an animated "no" to brush the surface, and to make it flow; but still remember, if you mean to please, to press your point with modesty and ease." - William Cowper

"That a Man should know the measure of his Gift, that he may desire and take a better when God giveth it." - Walter Hilton

"I don’t measure my life by the money I’ve made. Other people might, but certainly don’t." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"To look upon its grass grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace." - Washington Irving

"The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world." - Wendell Berry

"The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,' will presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn..." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"By practicing concentration the mind can be made stable. A stable mind helps in taking right decisions and achieving the desired result." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"If a householder molds himself according to the circumstances just like nature molds Herself according to seasons and performs his Karma then only shall he acquire happiness. One who does this successfully gains in all walks of life." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"One should, perform karma with nonchalance without expecting the benefits because sooner of later one shall definitely gets the fruits." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"He that speaks truth must have one foot in the stirrup." - Turkish Proverbs

"He that seeks God in everything is sure to find God in everything. When we thus live wholly unto God, God is wholly ours and we are then happy in all the happiness of God; for by uniting with Him in heart, and will, and spirit, we are united to all that He is and has in Himself. This is the purity and perfection of life that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer, that God's kingdom may come and His will be done in us, as it is in Heaven. And this we may be sure is not only necessary, but attainable by us." - William Law

"O, the difference of man and man! To thee a woman's services are due." -

"War comes today as the result of one of three causes: either actual or threatened wrong by one country to another, or suspicion by one country that another intends to do it wrong ... or, from bitterness of feeling, dependent in no degree whatever upon substantial questions of difference. . . . The least of these three causes of war is actual injustice." - Elihu Root

"In the pleasant orchard closes, `God bless all our gains', say we; but `May God bless all our losses' better suits with our degree." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"The Divine of the Lord in heaven is love, for the reason that love is receptive of all things of heaven, such as peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"In the common sense of the word, Judaism is not a religion, it is not a system of dogmas, of sacramental grace; it is not a bundle of rites and ceremonies; it is not a road to happiness in the hereafter; it is not a scheme of salvation from original sin; it does neither stand nor fall with our views as to the character of those books we call sacred, and as to their authorship. But it is a message to the world that righteousness must be its own reward, and is of that force which builds the world and shapes the courses of men." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

"He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, with that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars; winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire and visions rise and change which kill me with desire." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me - will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say, twenty years hence, “That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since - my children are dearer to me than she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them!” Will you say so, Heathcliff?" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"He that has no children knows not what love is." - English Proverbs

"If you have made a decision, and you still feel, taking it all in all, it was the right one, then don't look over your shoulder on what might have been. If it was wrong, ask for forgiveness and accept the present consequences, happily and without remorse. Nothing is more corrosive of the powers you should be using to meet the present." - Evelyn Underhill

"The will is what matters - as long as you have that, you are safe." - Evelyn Underhill

"When you let intuition have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most practical of all activities." - Evelyn Underhill

"How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity."" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh