Great Throughts Treasury

"Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided." - Wendell Berry

"The visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions." - Wendell Berry

"And none will hear the postman’s knock without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The uncritical relations of the dead…" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"There is little difference in people but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone

"The essential defect of the ideal utilitarian theory is that it ignores the highly personal; character of duty." - W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross

"Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past." - Walker Percy

"Politic man ordained imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears must be the crux for our compendia." - Wallace Stevens

"You took me weak and unprepared. I had not thought that you who shared my days, my nights, my heart, my life, would slash me with a naked knife and gently tell me not to bleed but to accept your crazy creed." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The adjective is the enemy of the noun." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"We are going to a new world... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"A thousand people cannot convince one by words to the extent that one person can convince a thousand by action." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"The resolute one who moved by the principles of Thy Faith extends the prosperity of order to his neighbors and works the land the evil now hold desolate, earns through Righteousness, the Blessed Recompense. Thy Good Mind has promised in Thy Kingdom of Heaven." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"It is entirely possible for you to live unburdened by one crisis after another." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Stupidity hurts, while intelligence does not hurt." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances." - Vicki Robin

"We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake…the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself." - Victor Cousin

"A social deformity perhaps still more hideous than the evil rich: the evil poor" - Victor Hugo

"Foppery is the egotism of clothes." - Victor Hugo

"Suddenly finding such a secret in the midst of one's happiness is like the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves." - Victor Hugo

"There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing." - Victor Hugo

"To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it." - Victor Hugo

"Vast horizons lead the soul to general ideas; circumscribed horizons engender one-sided ideas.... General ideas are hated by one-sided minds: such is the struggle for progress." - Victor Hugo

"Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second." - Victor Hugo

"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past." - Victor Hugo

"Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom." - Victor Hugo

"Move ahead. Give proper Nourishment to the body. May your hands,legs and body not be destroyed by death." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it" - Václav Havel

"The main thing is, it seems to me, that these revolutionary changes will enable us to escape from the rather antiquated straitjacket of this bipolar view of the world, and to enter at last into an era of multi-polarity. That is, into an era in which all of us, large and small, former slaves and former masters, will be able to create what your great President Lincoln called the family of man" - Václav Havel

"It is not true that men are better in poverty than in wealth." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"It is unjust to exact that men shall do out of deference to our advice what they have no desire to do for themselves." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The idea that science can and should be organized according to rules both fixed and universal is unrealistic and pernicious." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Women and young people develop their separate estimates of their tastes." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Self-love fools man with false opinion that earth, air, water, fire, the stars we see, though stronger and more beautiful than we, feel nought, love not, but move for us alone." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"Laws which are in advance of public sentiment are generally but a dead letter." - Tryon Edwards

"When you see a snake, never mind where he came from." - Turkish Proverbs