Great Throughts Treasury

"Deep malice makes too deep incision. Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed." - William Shakespeare

"There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape." - William Godwin

"Upon this principle I imagine it is that some of the finest pieces of antiquity are written in the dialogue manner. Plato and Tully, it should seem, thought truth could never be examined with more advantage than amidst the amicable opposition of well-regulated converse." - William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne

"Fortunes made in no time are like shirts made in no time; it's ten to one if they hang long together." - Douglas William Jerrold

"Not peace at any price! Chains are worse than bayonets." - Douglas William Jerrold

"O that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke To melt myself away in water drops! The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (King Richard at IV, i)" - William Shakespeare

"The arrow shot by the archer may or may not kill a single person. But stratagems devised by wise men can kill even babes in the womb." - Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL

"As to deserving, know that the gift of heaven is free; this gift of Knowledge is so great that no effort whatever could hope to 'deserve' it." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Women cannot trust men." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Jocelyn’s bedroom curtains swelled a little over the noisy window. The room was stuffy and – insupportable, so that she did not know where to turn. The house, fingered outwardly by the wind that dragged unceasingly past the walls, was, within, a solid silence: silence heavy as flesh. Jocelyn dropped her wrap to the floor, then watched how its feathered edges crept a little. A draught came in, under her bathroom door." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"She that herself will sliver and disbranch from her material sap, perforce must wither and come to deadly use." - William Shakespeare

"She would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too." - William Shakespeare

"Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found, a love that makes breath poor and speech unable." - William Shakespeare

"Such a nature, tickled with good success, disdains the shadow which he treads on at noon." - William Shakespeare

"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

"I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life… what happened was that I started to pray." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, What are your songs about? He replied, Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My guru says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it..." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are correct, but in only one respect - only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes- but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked that flat-out whoring but only very marginally." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I am more afraid of making a fault in my Latin than of the Kings of Spain, France, Scotland, the whole House of Guise, and all of their confederates." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"Defeat and victory only displace each other by turns." - Émile Souvestre

"A friend to all is a friend to none." - English Proverbs

"A friend who shares is a friend who cares." - English Proverbs

"A friend's frown is better than a foe's smile." - English Proverbs

"He is happy that thinks himself so." - English Proverbs

"How like us is that ugly brute, the ape!" - Ennius, fully Quintus Ennius NULL

"What riches are ours in the world of nature, from the majesty of the distant peak to the fragile beauty of a tiny flower, and all without cost to us, the beholders! No person is poor who has watched a sunrise or who keeps a mountain in his or her heart. " - Esther Baldwin York

"Summer in the deep South is not only a season, a climate, it's a dimension. Floating in it, one must be either proud or submerged." - Eugene Walter

"One gloomy day in 2009, the young Belarusian activist Pavel Lyashkovich learned the dangers of excessive social networking the hard way. A freshman at a public university in Minsk, he was unexpectedly called to the dean’s office, where he was met by two suspicious-looking men who told him they worked for the KGB, one public organization that the Belarusian authorities decided not to rename even after the fall of communism (they’re a brand-conscious bunch). The KGB officers asked Pavel all sorts of detailed questions about his trips to Poland and Ukraine as well as his membership in various antigovernment movements. Their extensive knowledge of the internal affairs of the Belarusian opposition – and particularly of Pavel’s own involvement in them, something he didn’t believe to be common knowledge – greatly surprised him. But then it all became clear, when the KGB duo loaded his page on vkontakte.ru, a popular Russian social networking site, pointing out that he was listed as a “friend” by a number of well-known oppositional activists. Shortly thereafter, the visitors offered Lyashkovich to sign an informal “cooperation agreement” with their organization. He declined – which may eventually cost him dearly, as many students sympathetic to the opposition and unwilling to cooperate with authorities have been expelled from universities in the past. We will never know how many other new suspects the KGB added to its list by browsing Lyashkovich’s profile." - Evgeny Morozov

"A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend - and he's a priest." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"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

"Blow, blow, ye western wind . . . Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I learned 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

"It was in the donor beginning writers Russians then later sacrifice all the others, but for a long time the Russians were only" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not. On the question you raised, the effects of wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"Who wants to teach others has to be learned himself." - Estonian Proverbs

"A cow gave birth to a fire: she wanted to lick it, but it burned; she wanted to leave it, but she could not because it was her own child." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"A shameless person has no sense of shame at all." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"An overly modest man goes hungry." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"If one is not in a hurry, even an egg will start walking." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief" - Euripedes NULL

"I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men." - Euripedes NULL

"In this world second thoughts, it seems, are best." - Euripedes NULL