Great Throughts Treasury

"If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now…What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear." - Thomas Merton

"Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions." - Thomas Nagel

"If I were king, my pipe should be premier. The skies of time and chance are seldom clear, We would inform them all with bland blue weather. Delight alone would need to shed a tear, For dream and deed should war no more together. Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear; Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather; And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere, If I were king. But politics should find no harbour near; The Philistine should fear to slip his tether; Tobacco should be duty free, and beer; In fact, in room of this, the age of leather, An age of gold all radiant should appear, If I were king." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

"But then I am a lawyer, and my business is to make a fuss about trifles." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there." - Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun

"I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life." - Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson

"If you're angry at a loved one, hug that person. And mean it. You may not want to hug - which is all the more reason to do so. It's hard to stay angry when someone shows they love you, and that's precisely what happens when we hug each other." - Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson

"It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations." - Walter Bagehot

"The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I don’t think anybody believed it. I still don’t think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at. By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they had signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best. The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish." - Wendell Berry

"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"Modern natural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if we learn to help them) will find in the Hegelian dialectics, materialistically interpreted, a series of answers to the philosophical problems which are being raised by the revolution in natural science." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Today, with the scars of our past failures marring our existence and the fears of the future weighing heavily on our spirits, we can no longer go on with this dangerous game of fragmentation. We can no longer escape the fact that we are all bonded, equal in wholeness. Science and technology have brought each of us into intimate relationship with all others. We are truly a global human family. Yet as a family, we have not learned how to live together in peace, to live without violence and exploitation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Man knows how to fly in the air like a bird, he knows how to swim in water like the fish, but how to live among other human beings, he does not know.”" - Vimala Thakar

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. The true object of juvenile education, is to provide, against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn. Whatever will inspire habits of industry and observation, will sufficiently answer this purpose." - William Godwin

"Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight." - William (Morley Punshon) McFee

"One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing." - Emma Goldman

"Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood." - Emma Goldman

"The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels." - Erich Auerbach

"His wife spotted the danger in our resolutely bohemian ways. You have only one year left before you qualify as a doctor and yet you're going away? You have no idea when you'll be back? But why? We couldn't give precise answers to her desperate questions and this horrified her." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"Words that do not match deeds are unimportant." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimize it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"To a crazy ship every wind is contrary." - Italian Proverbs

"Voice of one, voice of none." - Italian Proverbs

"For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning through the shadows." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien