Great Throughts Treasury

"As frost, raised to its utmost intensity, produces the sensation of fire, so any good quality, overwrought and pushed to excess, turns into its own contrary." - William Matthews

"Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life." - William Morris

"Forgetfulness of grief I yet may gain; in some wise may come ending to my pain; it may be yet the Gods will have me glad! Yet, Love, I would that thee and pain I had!" - William Morris

"Love is enough: draw near and behold me ye who pass by the way to your rest and your laughter, and are full of the hope of the dawn coming after; for the strong of the world have bought me and sold me and my house is all wasted from threshold to rafter. — pass by me, and hearken, and think of me not!" - William Morris

"O thrush, your song is passing sweet but never a song that you have sung,is half so sweet as thrushes sang when my dear Love and I were young." - William Morris

"The pomp of funerals has more regard to the vanity of the living than the honour of the dead." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"All people entrusted with office should attend equally to their duties. Their work may sometimes be interrupted due to illness or their being sent on missions. But whenever they are able to attend to business they should do so as if they knew what it was about and not obstruct public affairs on the grounds they are not personally familiar with them." - Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya

"One has carefully scented a robe and then forgotten about it for several days. When finally one comes to wear it, the aroma is even more delicious than on freshly scented clothes." - Sei Shōnagon

"Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise." - Edwin Way Teale

"For knowledge... you should know that peace is an indispensable condition of getting it." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Give me a fish, I have the day's food. Teach me how to fish and I will have everyday's food." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Women cannot trust men." - Egyptian Proverbs

"The way we see what God is only a reflection of the way we see Anfsnna. If not God brings to our minds to fear and blame, it means that a great deal of fear and blame is flowing in our souls, but if we saw God full of love and compassion , we will be well" - Elif Safak

"So, when this loose behavior I throw off and pay the debt I never promised, by how much better than my word I am, by so much shall I falsify men's hopes; and, like bright metal on a sullen ground, my reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, shall show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off." - William Shakespeare

"Some grief shows much of love, but much of grief shows still some want of wit." - William Shakespeare

"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, brief as the lightning in the collied night, that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, — Behold! The jaws of darkness do devour it up: so quick bright things come to confusion." - William Shakespeare

"So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"This is what we are like. Collectively as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost 100 years old, and she told me, There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Children use the fist until they are of the age to use the brain." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Sleep on, Baby, on the floor, tired of all the playing, sleep with smile the sweeter for that you dropped away in! On your curls' full roundness stand golden lights serenely-- one cheek, pushed out by the hand, folds the dimple inly." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Thank God for grace, Ye who weep only! If, as some have done, Ye grope tear-blinded in a desert place and touch but tombs,--look up! Those tears will run soon in long rivers down the lifted face, and leave the vision clear for stars and sun." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse that brands and burdens; it is life and death. It is the great law of the universe; and nothing can exist without its breath." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Oh! I know this truth, if I know no other, that passionate Love is Pain's own mother." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference." - Ellen Goodman

"All religion relates to life, and the life of religion is to do good." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"Love and thoughts are not in space and time." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"What have you done with the days God granted you?" - Émile Souvestre

"It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!" - Emile Zola

"I cannot live with you, it would be life, and life is over there behind the shelf." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"I am the only being whose doom no tongue would ask no eye would mourn I never caused a thought of gloom a smile of joy since I was born in secret pleasure — secret tears this changeful life has slipped away as friendless after eighteen years as lone as on my natal day." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I assure you, a tiger, or a venomous serpent could not rouse terror in me equal to that which he wakens." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder... Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment." - Emma Goldman

"We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?" - Emma Goldman

"This extraordinary Power, mystic though I have rightly called it, is nevertheless very real, no mere imaginary abstraction, but actually the most practical thing there is. The existence of this Power is already well known to thousands of people in the world today, and has been known to certain enlightened souls for tens of thousands of years. This Power is really no less than the primal Power of Being, and to discover that Power is the Divine birthright of all men. It is your right and your privilege to make your contact with this Power, and to allow it to work through your body, mind, and estate, so that you need no longer grovel upon the ground amid limitations and difficulties, but can soar up on wings like an eagle to the realm of dominion and joy." - Emmet Fox

"A lawyer never goes to law himself." - English Proverbs

"No living man all things can." - English Proverbs

"In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not." - Ernest Becker

"We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffer­ing and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer." - Ernest Becker

"I thought I paid for everything. Not like women, pay and pay and pay. There is not a reward or punishment. Just exchange of values. Something comparable to, and in return you get something else. Or work for the sake of something. Anyway after all, at least partially good pay. Much of what I was paying, like me, and I had a good time. You pay either the knowledge or experience, or risk, or money. Enjoy life is nothing like the ability to get something equivalent expended money and realize it. And to get the full price for your money you can. Our world - a solid company. Excellent as a theory. In five years, I thought, it seems to me the same stupid, like all my other superior theory." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is" - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"The law of attraction is most understood when you see yourself as a magnet getting more and more of the way you FEEL." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"The thought that you think, you think, which attracts to it - so you think it some more, which attracts to it - so you think it some more. In other words, when you have an expectation, you've got a dominant thought going on, and Law of Attraction is going to deliver that to you again and again and again." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"You cannot receive vibrationally something that you are not a vibrational match to. And so, bless those who are finding abundance. And in your blessing of them and their abundance, you will become abundant too." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"For a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life . . . to life itself. I caught a glimpse of something greater than myself." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill