Great Throughts Treasury

"The rich Physician, honor'd Lawyers ride, Whilst the poor Scholar foots it by their side." - Robert Burton

"Whilst the poor Scholar foots it by their side." - Robert Burton

"His fatherly love is greater than any injustice whatsoever." - Saint Bernard of Clairvaux NULL

"One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, that the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; for my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near, bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections." - Washington Irving

"The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so." - Wallace Stevens

"As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The school is the resultant of pedantry; the school is the literary excrescence of the budget; the school is intellectual mandarinship governing in the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatrical feuilleton of the prefecture to the biographies and encyclopedias duly examined and stamped and hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refinement, by republicans agreeable to the police; the school is the classic and scholastic orthodoxy, with its unbroken girdle of walls, Homeric and Virgilian antiquity traded upon by official and licensed literati — a sort of China calling itself Greece; the school is, summed up in one concretion which forms part of public order, all the knowledge of pedagogues, all the history of historiographers, all the poetry of laureates, all the philosophy of sophists, all the criticism of pedants, all the ferules of the teaching friars, all the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes, all the metaphysics of partisans, all the justice of bureaucrats, all the old age of dapper young men bereft of their virility, all the flattery of courtiers, all the diatribes of censer-bearers, all the independence of flunkeys, all the certitudes of the short-sighted and of base souls. The school is the resultant of pedantry; the school is the literary excrescence of the budget; the school is intellectual mandarinship governing in the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatrical feuilleton of the prefecture to the biographies and encyclopedias duly examined and stamped and hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refinement, by republicans agreeable to the police; the school is the classic and scholastic orthodoxy, with its unbroken girdle of walls, Homeric and Virgilian antiquity traded upon by official and licensed literati — a sort of China calling itself Greece; the school is, summed up in one concretion which forms part of public order, all the knowledge of pedagogues, all the history of historiographers, all the poetry of laureates, all the philosophy of sophists, all the criticism of pedants, all the ferules of the teaching friars, all the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes, all the metaphysics of partisans, all the justice of bureaucrats, all the old age of dapper young men bereft of their virility, all the flattery of courtiers, all the diatribes of censer-bearers, all the independence of flunkeys, all the certitudes of the short-sighted and of base souls." - Victor Hugo

"A man is known by his deeds. So, our deeds should be such that helps in earning respect in the society." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"A scholar cannot sit with an ignorant person and expect to gain by the meeting." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"A scholar is always praised. He who attains knowledge also acquires capabilities to vanquish his enemies." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"A time is envisioned when the world was not, only a watery chaos (the dark, indistinguishable sea ) and a warm cosmic breath, which could give an impetus of life." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"Acquiring knowledge is one thing but if it is not translated into action then there is no use of such knowledge." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"By making charity one can attain a very respectable and adorable position in the society." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things." - Vannevar Bush

"Do not hate the man with the lowest." - Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming

"The execution of anything considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation." - William Godwin

"O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear!" - William Shakespeare

"Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh