Great Throughts Treasury

"The women had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light - all this silly talk about line, color and form" - Willem de Kooning

"I looked for my soul but my soul I could not see. I looked for my God but my God eluded me. I looked for a friend and then I found all three." - William Blake

"In yonder Grave a Druid lies Where slowly winds the Stealing Wave! The Year's best Sweets shall duteous rise To deck its Poet's sylvan Grave!" - William Collins

"Even by means of our sorrows we belong to the eternal plan." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"In all the thousands of times I have asked other people for advice, I never yet got the advice I wanted." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"People who read stories are said to have excitable brains." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . ." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal..." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"It is interesting to notice that in discussing the mechanism of psychoanalysis in liberating the ‘abnormal’ patient from his symptoms, Freud repeatedly lays stress on the fact that the efficient factor in the process is not the actual introduction of the suppressed experiences into the conscious field, but the overcoming of the resistances to such an endeavor. I have attempted to show that these resistances or counter-impulses are of environmental origin, and owe their strength to the specific sensitiveness of the gregarious mind. Resistances of similar type and identical origin are responsible for the formation of the so-called normal type of mind. It is a principal thesis of an earlier essay in this book that this normal type is far from being psychologically healthy, is far from rendering available the full capacity of the mind for foresight and progress, and being in exclusive command of directing power in the world, is a danger to civilization." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger. In this case, the destruction or killing of the object is the biologically purposeful goal. The original motive is not pleasure in destruction. Rather the destruction serves the “life instinct”…and is an attempt to avoid anxiety and to preserve the ego in its totality. I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live." - Wilhelm Reich

"Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness." - Wilhelm Reich

"Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue." - Wilhelm Reich

"Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!" - Wilhelm Reich

"Sexual inhibition alters the structure of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests." - Wilhelm Reich

"I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing" - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy, by God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Under a cabinet constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required — are impediments — in common times. A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham — a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of the world we want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman — to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm." - Walter Bagehot

"Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith." - Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius

"Light your lamp and see the five windows in this image through which error enters your soul; as the prophet (Jeremiah) said, ‘Death comes in at the windows... through the eye it looks for strange things as with the other senses. So you must close these windows and open them only when necessary." - Walter Hilton

"We therefore need to know the gifts given us by God, so that we may use them, for by these we shall be saved." - Walter Hilton

"You may now ask how it can be true that this image of God, which is man’s soul, can be restored to His likeness here in this life; it would seem to be impossible. You must admit you are very far from such a position. If it were restored we would possess sound understanding, clear vision, and pure ardent Love of God and Spiritual things all of the time. Your thoughts, your reason and affections of the soul are so immersed in Earthly things that your have little perception of Spiritual things." - Walter Hilton

"Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

"Any faith that takes the Kingdom of God seriously, has its fight cut out for it. Unless we accept our share of it, we are playing with our discipleship. But when the fight is for the Kingdom of God, those who dodge, lose; and those who lose, win. Which involves more conflict, a life set on the Kingdom of God on earth, or a faith set on the life to come?" - Walter Rauschenbusch

"Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master." - Walter Rauschenbusch

"For, although, as Eliot justly maintains in [his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”], works of literature are “not the expression of personality but an escape from personality,” and in this are unlike ordinary dialogue, they are nevertheless not quite an escape to an object, a thing adequately conceivable, even analogously, in terms of surfaces and visual or tactile perceptions. Works of literature consist in words, and, as we have suggested, words themselves retain in themselves ineluctably something of the interiority of their birth within that interior which is a person. As cries, they go “out,” but they are not extensions of, or projections of interiority. In this sense Camus’s and Sartre’s view of man as an interior exteriorizing itself is quite inadequate to the totality of the human situation. We are more accurate if we keep our metaphors closer to the world of sound and think of speech and of works of literature as “amplifications” or, better, as intensifications of an interior. All words projected from a speaker remain, as has been seen, somehow interior to him, being an invitation to another person, another interior, to share the speaker’s interior, and invitation to enter in, not to regard from the outside." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"In high technology cultures today, everyone lives each day in a frame of abstract computed time enforced by millions of printed calendars, clock, and watches. In twelfth-century England there were no clocks or watches or wall or desk calendars." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"It is of course possible to count as "writing" any semiotic mark, that is, any visible or sensible mark which an individual makes and assigns a meaning to. Using the term "writing" in this extended sense trivializes its meaning. The critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness not when simple semiotic marking was devised but when a coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text. This is what we usually mean today by writing in its sharply focused sense." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Oratory has deep agonistic roots. The development of the vast rhetorical tradition was distinctive of the west and was related, whether as cause or effect or both, to the tendency among the Greeks and their cultural epigoni to maximize oppositions, in the mental as in the extramental world: this by contrast with Indians and Chinese, who programmatically minimized them." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"As the years go by, give me but peace, freedom from ten thousand matters. I ask myself and always answer: What can be better than coming home? A wind from the pine-trees blows my sash, and my lute is bright with the mountain moon. You ask me about good and evil fortune?... Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing!" - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"To be a stranger in a strange land: Whenever one feasts, one thinks of one's brother twice as much as before, There where my brother far away is ascending, The dogwood is flowering, and a man is missed." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"Now it's $200 billion. If we don't change the course, the rest of the world could own $15 trillion of us. That's pretty substantial. That's equal to the value of all American stock." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Be in a state of gratitude for everything that shows up in your life. Be thankful for the storms as well as the smooth sailing. What is the lesson or gift in what you are experiencing right now? Find your joy not in what’s missing in your life but in how you can serve." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Each person must decide for himself what he wants each day. As a leader, I will expose you to the options and the likely consequences of those options. I'll even share my opinion if asked, but I'll never confuse it with the opinion, which simply doesn't exist." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"If you meet someone whose soul is not aligned with yours, send them love and move along." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"If you want to feel connected to your own purpose, know this for certain: Your purpose will only be found in service to others and in being connected to the something far greater than your mind-body-ego." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Take some time to be silent and repeat the sound of God as an inner mantra. Meditation allows you to make conscious contact with your Source and achieve success in every area. If a problem arises, then go within, get very quiet about it and find the answers inside of you." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Your IQ is an illusion. You can change that number around drastically by changing what is on the tests." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Even in the middle of a hurricane, the bottom of the sea is calm. As the storm rages and the winds howl, the deep waters sway in gentle rhythm, a light movement of fish and plant life. Below there is no storm." - Wayne Muller

"Every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Love someone who doesn't deserve it. Plant sequoias. Be joyful even though you've considered the facts. Practice resurrection." - Wendell Berry

"I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will." - Wendell Berry

"If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution — the “justice” of exchanging one damage for another." - Wendell Berry