Great Throughts Treasury

"The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition." - Wendell Berry

"We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them." - Wendell Berry

"White has been abstracted into a magical nebulous mythology that dominates all inhabitants of our country in their attitudes toward one another. We are all prisoners of that mythology so far as we rebel against it." - Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.

"One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"If our thoughts, actions and deeds are pure then we are automatically blessed with added benefits like good health, strength, long life and most importantly benediction. Therefore we should try to keep ourselves pure and chaste." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"They turn their faces away from the True Guru; they continue to wander aimlessly. They are not accepted by the earth or the sky; they fall into manure, and rot." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness." - William Godwin

"He that is endeavoring to subdue, and root out of his mind, all those passions of pride, envy and ambition, which religion opposes, is doing more to make himself happy, even in this life than he that is contriving means to indulge them." - William Law

"Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the gift of not belonging." - Elizabeth Lesser

"Unless the being of a God be presupposed, no tolerable account can be given of the being of any thing." - Ezekial Hopkins

"The very greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself." - Eudora Welty

"I speak of honor-your honor to God-your honor to country-your honor to self. I sincerely believe it to be the cure to most of our ills, both on a national or individual basis." - Ezra Taft Benson

"An ideal is a port toward which we resolve to steer. We may not reach it. The mere fact that our goal is definitely located does not suffice to conduct us thither. But surely we shall thus stand a better chance of making port in the end than if we drift about aimlessly, the sport of winds and tides, without having decided in our own minds in what direction we ought to bend our course. The moral law is the expression of our inmost nature, and when we live in consonance with it we feel that we are living out our true being." - Felix Adler

"When the danger is past God is cheated." - Italian Proverbs