Great Throughts Treasury

"To a Lady Before Marriage - Oh! form'd by Nature, and refin'd by Art, With charms to win, and sense to fix the heart! By thousands sought, Clotilda, canst thou free Thy croud of captives and descend to me? Content in shades obscure to waste thy life, A hidden beauty and a country wife. O! listen while thy summers are my theme, Ah! sooth thy partner in his waking dream! In some small hamlet on the lonely plain, Where Thames, through meadows, rolls his mazy train; Or where high Windsor, thick with greens array'd, Waves his old oaks, and spreads his ample shade, Fancy has figur'd out our calm retreat; Already round the visionary seat Our limes begin to shoot, our flowers to spring, The brooks to murmur, and the birds to sing. Where dost thou lie, thou thinly-peopled green? Thou nameless lawn, and village yet unseen? Where sons, contented with their native ground, Ne'er travell'd further than ten furlongs round; And the tann'd peasant, and his ruddy bride, Were born together, and together died. Where early larks best tell the morning light, And only Philomel disturbs the night, 'Midst gardens here my humble pile shall rise, With sweets surrounded of ten thousand dies; All savage where th' embroider'd gardens end, The haunt of echoes, shall my woods ascend; And oh! if Heaven th' ambitious thought approve, A rill shall warble cross the gloomy grove, A little rill, o'er pebbly beds convey'd, Gush down the steep, and glitter through the glade. What chearing scents those bordering banks exhale! How loud that heifer lows from yonder vale! That thrush how shrill! his note so clear, so high, He drowns each feather'd minstrel of the sky. Here let me trace beneath the purpled morn, The deep-mouth'd beagle, and the sprightly horn; Or lure the trout with well dissembled flies, Or fetch the fluttering partridge from the skies. Nor shall thy hand disdain to crop the vine, The downy peach, or flavour'd nectarine; Or rob the bee-hive of its golden hoard, And bear th' unbought luxuriance to thy board. Sometimes my books by day shall kill the hours, While from thy needle rise the silken flowers, And thou, by turns, to ease my feeble sight, Resume the volume, and deceive the night. Oh! when I mark thy twinkling eyes opprest, Soft whispering, let me warn my love to rest; Then watch thee, charm'd, while sleep locks every sense, And to sweet Heaven commend thy innocence. Thus reign'd our fathers o'er the rural fold, Wise, hale, and honest in the days of old; Till courts arose, where substance pays for show, And specious joys are bought with real woe. See Flavia's pendants, large, well-spread, and right, The ear that wears them hears a fool each night: Mark how the embroider'd colonel sneaks away, To shun the withering dame that made him gay; That knave, to gain a title, lost his fame; That rais'd his credit by a daughter's shame; This coxcomb's ribband cost him half his land, And oaks, unnumber'd, bought that fool a wand. Fond man, as all his sorrows were too few, Acquires strange wants that nature never knew, By midnight lamps he emulates the day, And sleeps, perverse, the chearful suns away; From goblets high-embost, his wine must glide, Found his clos'd sight the gorgeous curtain slide; Fruits ere their time to grace his pomp must rise, And three untasted courses glut his eyes. For this are nature's gentle calls withstood, The voice of conscience, and the bonds of blood; This wisdom thy reward for every pain, And this gay glory all thy mighty gain. Fair phantoms woo'd and scorn'd from age to age, Since bards began to laugh, and priests to rage. And yet, just curse on man's aspiring kind, Prone to ambition, to example blind, Our children's children shall our steps pursue, And the same errours be for ever new. Mean while in hope a guiltless country swain, My reed with warblings chears the imagin'd plain. Hail humble shades, where truth and silence dwell! The noisy town and faithless court farewell! Farewell ambition, once my darling flame! The thirst of lucre, and the charm of fame! In life's by-road, that winds through paths unknown, My days, though number'd, shall be all my own. Here shall they end, (O! might they twice begin) And all be white the Fates intend to spin. " - Thomas Tickell

"Our Rock, our Redeemer, our King, Creator of holy beings. You shall be praised forever. You fashion angelic spirits to serve You; beyond the heavens, they all await Your command. In chorus they proclaim with reverence words of the living God, eternal King. Adoring beloved, and choice are they all, in awe fulfilling their Creator’s will. In purity and sanctity they raise their voices in song and psalm, extolling and exalting, declaring the power, praise, holiness, and majesty of God, the great mighty, awesome King, the Holy One. One to another they vow loyalty to God’s kingship, one to another they join to hallow their Creator with serenity, pure speech, and sacred song, in unison chanting reverence: Holy, holy, holy, Adonai tzeva’ot; the whole world is filled with His glory. As in the prophet’s vision, soaring celestial creatures roar, responding with a chorus of adoration: Praised be the glory of the Lord throughout the universe. To praiseworthy God they sweetly sing; the living, enduring God they celebrate in song. For He is unique, doing mighty deeds, creating new life, championing justice, sowing righteousness, reaping victory, bringing healing. Awesome in praise, Sovereign of wonders, day after day in His goodness He renews Creation. So sang the Psalmist: “Praise the Creator of great lights, for his love endures forever.” Cause a new light to illumine Zion, may we all soon share a portion of its radiance. Praised are You, Lord, Creator of lights." - Union Prayer Book NULL

"The Purposes of the United Nations are: To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends." - United Nations NULL

"In music, sometimes a man will feel that he comes to the edge of breaking out from prison bars of existence, breaking out from the universe altogether. There is a sense that the goal is at hand; that the boundary wall of the universe is crumbling and will be breached at the next moment, when the soul will pass out free into the infinite." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"The mystical theory of ethics is logically forced into the position of maintaining that all love (though not necessarily all kinds of appetition), whether in men or in animals, arises out of mystical experience either explicit or latent. The mystical theory can thus only maintain itself by supposing that mystical experience is latent in all living beings, but that in most men and in all animals it is profoundly submerged in the subconscious; and that it throws up influences above the threshold in the form of feelings of sympathy and love. To say that I love or sympathize with another living being is to say that I feel his feelings -- for instance that I suffer when he suffers or rejoice when he rejoices. The mystical theory will allege that this phenomenon is an incipient and partial breaking down of the barriers and partitions which separate the two individual selves; and if this breakdown were completed, it would lead to an actual identity of the “I” and the “he.” Love is thus a dim groping towards that disappearance of individuality in the Universal Self which is part of the essence of mysticism." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"Throughout heaven and earth is Mind [hsin], whose changes are unpredictable. It is inexorably manifested in myriad different forms. The mind has no fundamental substance. Fundamental substance is that which is achieved by its efficacious effort. Therefore, to plumb th principle is to prob e the myriad different forms of the Mind, not the myriad different forms of myriad things." - Wang Fuzhi or Fu-chih or Fuchih, pseudonym Chuanshan, courtesy name Ernong

"Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth. The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

"To Morning - O Holy virgin! clad in purest white, Unlock heav’n’s golden gates, and issue forth; Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring The honey’d dew that cometh on waking day. O radiant morning, salute the sun Rous’d like a huntsman to the chase, and with Thy buskin’d feet appear upon our hills." - William Blake

"Sweet stream that winds through yonder glade, Apt emblem of a virtuous maid Silent and chaste she steals along, Far from the world's gay busy throng: With gentle yet prevailing force, Intent upon her destined course; Graceful and useful all she does, Blessing and blest where'er she goes; Pure-bosom'd as that watery glass, And Heaven reflected in her face. " - William Cowper

"God Hides His People - To lay the soul that loves him low, Becomes the Only–wise: To hide beneath a veil of woe, The children of the skies. Man, though a worm, would yet be great; Though feeble, would seem strong; Assumes an independent state, By sacrilege and wrong. Strange the reverse, which, once abased, The haughty creature proves! He feels his soul a barren waste, Nor dares affirm he loves. Scorned by the thoughtless and the vain, To God he presses near; Superior to the world's disdain, And happy in its sneer. Oh welcome, in his heart he says, Humility and shame! Farewell the wish for human praise, The music of a name! But will not scandal mar the good That I might else perform? And can God work it, if he would, By so despised a worm? Ah, vainly anxious!—leave the Lord To rule thee, and dispose; Sweet is the mandate of his word, And gracious all he does. He draws from human littleness His grandeur and renown; And generous hearts with joy confess The triumph all his own. Down, then, with self–exalting thoughts; Thy faith and hope employ, To welcome all that he allots, And suffer shame with joy. No longer, then, thou wilt encroach On his eternal right; And he shall smile at thy approach, And make thee his delight. " - William Cowper

"His wit run him out of his money, and now his poverty has run him out of his wits." - William Congreve

"Such stuff the world is made of." - William Cowper

"With filial confidence inspired, can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye, and smiling say, my father made them all!" - William Cowper

"Nowadays it is about as big a crime to be dumb as it is to be dishonest." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign." - Walter Lippmann

"The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error." - Walter Lippmann

"Cultures vary greatly in their exploitation of the various senses and in the way in which they relate to their conceptual apparatus to the various senses. It has been a commonplace that the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks differed in the value they set on the auditory. The Hebrews tended to think of understanding as a kind of hearing, whereas the Greeks thought of it more as a kind of seeing, although far less exclusively as seeing than post-Cartesian Western man generally has tended to do." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"I am heartily glad to witness your veneration for a book which to say nothing of its holiness or authority, contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence." - Walter Savage Landor

"O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet." - Walter Savage Landor

"It is the divine attribute of the imagination that it is irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of a dungeon." - Washington Irving

"Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin." - Washington Irving

"I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup." - Wendell Berry

"If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too." - Wendell Berry

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say It is yet more difficult than you thought. This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." - Wendell Berry

"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

"The key statement about anyone's life is the redemption of the manifestation, through depth understanding that bypasses social conditioning, spiritual materialism, defenses and preferences." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"Furthermore philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous and of very different kinds; as, for example, in the case of the conducting of water. For at points of intake and at curves, and at places where it is raised to a level, currents of air naturally form in one way or another; and nobody who has not learned the fundamental principles of physics from philosophy will be able to provide against the damage which they do." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

"I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Growing into Silence - The voluntary cessation, non-action of movement, can become possible if the brain, the cerebral organ, is not a restless, disorderly, chaotic brain." - Vimala Thakar

"One has to begin with being introduced to one's own mind. To watch how the mind works, to watch how we live second-hand through emotions, feelings and sentiments. How we call them our own and identify ourselves with them. To watch all this, will be the beginning of meditation." - Vimala Thakar

"The white man is problem-solving. His conceptualizations merge into science and then emerge in his social life as problems, the solutions of which are the adjustments of his social machine. Slavery, prohibition, Civil Rights, and social services are all important adjustments of the white man's social machine. No solution he has reached has proven adequate. Indeed, it has often proven demonic." - Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.

"She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Friend, have the courage to care little for wealth, and shape yourself, you too, to merit godhead." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

"The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas." - Victor Hugo

"There is a way of falling into error while on the way to truth." - Victor Hugo

"With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage." - Victor Hugo

"Honor and dishonor are the same to me; I have placed my forehead upon the Guru's Feet. Wealth does not excite me, and misfortune does not disturb me; I have embraced love for my Lord and Master." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"There’s no excuse for poverty in a state as rich as California. We can produce so much food that we have to dump it into our bay." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"When they the American soldiers came, they found fit comrades for their courage and their devotion... Joining hands with them, the men of America gave the greatest of all gifts - the gift of life and the gift of spirit." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Whatever purifies the heart also fortifies it." - Hugh Blair

"In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"And witch the world with noble horsemanship." - William Shakespeare

"But all the story of the night told over, and their minds transfigur'd so together, more witnesseth than fancy's images, and grows to something of great constancy, but howsoever strange, and admirable. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago! Othello, Act iv, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness." - William Godwin