Great Throughts Treasury

"What encouragement could there be to lift up our eyes to one that were of one mind this day and of another mind to-morrow? Who would put up a petition to an earthly prince that were so mutable as to grant a petition one day and deny it another, and change his own act? But if a prince promise this or that thing upon such or such a condition, and you know his promise to be as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, would any man reason thus? because it is unchangeable we will not seek to him, we will not perform the condition upon which the fruit of the proclamation is to be enjoyed. Who would not count such an inference ridiculous? What blessings hath not God promised upon the condition of seeking him?" - Stephen Charnock

"Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets. These may be put on a frame of little sticks and turned round. This causes the tides. Those at the ends of the sticks are enormously far away. From time to time a diligent searching of the sticks reveals new planets. The orbit of the planet is the distance the stick goes round in going round. Astronomy is intensely interesting; it should be done at night, in a high tower at Spitzbergen. This is to avoid the astronomy being interrupted. A really good astronomer can tell when a comet is coming too near him by the warning buzz of the revolving sticks." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius." - Thomas Carlyle

"I have no sympathy whatever with those who would grudge our workmen and our common people the very highest acquisitions which their taste, or their time, or their inclinations, would lead them to realize; for next to the salvation of their souls, I certainly say that the object of my fondest aspirations is the moral and intellectual, and, as a sure consequence of this, the economical, advancement of the working classes,—the one object which of all others in the wide range of political speculation is the one which should be the dearest to the heart of every philanthropist and every patriot." - Thomas Chalmers

"I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere… And it's that willingness to slow down and examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives that is the poet's interest." - William Collins

"A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; the language plain, and incidents well link'd; tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close." - William Cowper

"When Gott made the womens, he was sorry afterwards for the poor mens--and he made tobaccos to comfort them." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"Andrew Jackson was the first one to think up the idea to promise everybody that if they will vote for you, you will give them an office when you get it, and the more times they vote for you, the bigger the office." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I don't know what's going to be done about it. One time the Government split up Standard Oil into 31 parts, and in two years each one of the 31 was bigger than the original. So it looked like they just thrived on being split up." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. Betty [his wife] is to blame for it all. Whatever I am or have accomplished, I owe to Betty. I ain't got no sense. My wife made me what I am. In other words-local girl makes good in the city-makes good man." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god." - Washington Irving

"Improve memory and attention with scientific brain games." - Washington Irving

"The best contribution one can make to humanity is to improve oneself." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a 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

"The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"According to my mother, some sort of phantom stole into the room where I lay in my cradle and struck me on the head with a silver hammer. [In response to “To what do you attribute that marvelous imagination of yours?]" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his testicles. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty; make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry Hold, hold! Othello, Act iv, Scene 2" -

"Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use." - William James

"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency." - William Matthews

"Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Fortune converts everything to the advantage of her favorites." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." - Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner

"Ah! you are come, are you, Edgar Linton?' she said, with angry animation. 'You are one of those things that are ever found when least wanted, and when you are wanted, never! I suppose we shall have plenty of lamentations now - I see we shall - but they can't keep me from my narrow home out yonder: my resting-place, where I'm bound before spring is over! There it is: not among the Lintons, mind, under the chapel-roof, but in the open air, with a head-stone; and you may please yourself whether you go to them or come to me!" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Myths that need clarification: Everyone in California lives on a white, sandy beach. False. The only people who live on California beaches are vacationers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada who own condos." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."" - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again." - Evelyn Underhill

"The devil is bad because he is old." -