Great Throughts Treasury

"No woman wrote Procedure , Moby Dick or the Seven Pillars of Wisdom . They do not deny the human condition, because they begin to take it fully. This explains why his works lack the metaphysical resonance and humor black: they do not put the world in brackets, do not you ask questions, do not denounce the contradictions: take it seriously." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid." - Thomas Carlyle

"The finest flowers of genius have grown in an atmosphere where those of Nature are prone to droop, and difficult to bring to maturity." - Thomas Guthrie

"If you are yourself at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. Then share your peace with everyone, and everyone will be at peace." - Thomas Merton

"In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist." - Thomas Merton

"He that is the author of war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." - Thomas Paine

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon." - Thomas Paine

"When the qualification to vote is regulated by years, it is placed on the firmest possible ground, because the qualification is such as nothing but dying before the time can take away ; and the equality of Rights, as a principle, is recognized in the act of regulating the exercise. But when Rights are placed upon, or made dependent upon property, they are on the most precarious of all tenures. Riches make themselves wings, and fly away, and the rights fly with them ; and thus they become lost to the man when they would be of most value." - Thomas Paine

"But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine." - William Blake

"To my eye Rubens' coloring is most contemptible. His shadows are a filthy brown somewhat the color of excrement." - William Blake

"We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs." - Wilhelm Reich

"I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories." - Washington Irving

"Such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst-- Heaven bless the mark!" - Washington Irving

"In distress will the faithful friend be seen." - Welsh Proverbs

"In every choice there is perplexity." - Welsh Proverbs

"There is no interruption in creation; no broken arch, no lapse; an action and its consequences embrace all nature; the chain may be longer or shorter, but never breaks. (II.3.iii)" - Victor Hugo

"A man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"Conscience is too great a power in the nature of man to be altogether subdued: it may for a time be repressed and kept dormant; but conjectures there are in human life which awaken it; and when once re-awakened, it flashes on the sinner’s mind with all the horrors of an invisible ruler and a future judgment." - Hugh Blair

"The spirit of prayer is a pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life, it is a stretching with all its desire after the life of God, it is a leaving, as far as it can, all its own spirit, to receive a spirit from above, to be one life, one love, one spirit with Christ in God." - William Law

"Give me love and work - these two only" - William Morris

"As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Has become my thoughts more like neighbors veterans, annoying, but they have become dear, there is room for all of us in this neighborhood." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine—just imagine!—what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It's just your ego, which seeks to retain power. Holds and the feeling of ambivalence, trying to convince you that you are deficient, disturbed and lonely rather than complete. If you keep the spiritual path, your ego will soon be out of business, and all decisions will make your heart. Replied attention. Instead of trying to force izgurnuti thoughts from his mind, give him something healthier, which can be played. For example, love." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me and tell me that you did." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become log-jammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Yes and no rule the world." - Italian Proverbs