Great Throughts Treasury

"Master, let me walk with thee in lowly paths of service free; tell me thy secret; help me bear the strain of toil, the fret of care." - Washington Gladden

"In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known." - Wendell Berry

"Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare. For about half of the last century, we worried about world conquest by international communism. Now with less worry (so far) we are witnessing world conquest by international capitalism. Though its political means are milder (so far) than those of communism, this newly internationalized capitalism may prove even more destructive of human cultures and communities, of freedom, and of nature. Its tendency is just as much toward total dominance and control." - Wendell Berry

"The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life." - Wendell Berry

"The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore, the snake has left its skin upon the floor. Key West sank downward under massive clouds and silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon is at the mast-head and the past is dead." - Wallace Stevens

"Her green mind made the world around her green." - Wallace Stevens

"It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked and tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun." - Wallace Stevens

"Out of the first warmth of spring, and out of the shine of the menlocks, among the bare and crooked trees, she found a helping from the cold, like a meaning in nothingness." - Wallace Stevens

"That other one wanted to think his way to life, sure that the ultimate poem was the mind, or of the mind, or of the mind in these Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind; half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky, half desire for indifference about the sky." - Wallace Stevens

"The idols have seen lots of poverty, snakes and gold and lice, but not the truth." - Wallace Stevens

"From the correct Marxist premise concerning the deep economic roots of the class struggle in general and of the political struggle in particular, the Economists have drawn the singular conclusion that we must turn our backs on the political struggle and retard its development, narrow its scope, and reduce its aims. The political wing, on the contrary, has drawn a different conclusion from these same premises, namely, that the deeper the roots of our present struggle, the more widely, the more boldly, the more resolutely, and with greater initiative must we wage this struggle." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"They who say all men are equal speak an undoubted truth, if they mean that all have an equal right to liberty, to their property, and to their protection of the laws. - But they are mistaken if they think men are equal in their station and employments, since they are not so by their talents." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favorite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns — what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"May we be blessed with the wealth of maximum capabilities. May we be blessed by the sermon of divine knowledge leading to our progress." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"One should be happy and pleased and then only take part in religious sacrifices." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"Anybody taking the above resolutions will naturally make efforts to fulfill them." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, the variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"There are no right answers to wrong questions." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole." - Václav Havel

"Who knows suffering can dare anything." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"As human beings, we are close to the demons and far from the Buddhas. We can become a demon king any time we want. If we wish to become a Buddha, however, we must cut through dense thickets of evil views. We have to cast out deviant views and constantly cultivate proper views before we can escape the demons' nets." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

"I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, "A free field and no favor."" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him." - Thucydides NULL

"Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!" - William Godwin

"Among these, the mind (manas) is both an organ of sensation and of action. It is deliberative and it is an organ cognate with the rest. They are multifarious due to the specific modifications of the gunas, and so are the external diversities." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

"When crossing a river in bright moonlight, I love to see the water scatter in showers of crystal under the oxen's feet." - Sei Shōnagon

"You may try to support your family and friends, but at the time of death all other actions besides the virtuous practices of Dharma activities will have been pointless. So constantly apply yourself to spiritual practices in thought, word, and deed!" - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"ROSENCRANTZ: I understand you not, my lord. HAMLET: I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET: The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing — GUILDENSTERN: A thing, my lord? HAMLET: Of nothing." - William Shakespeare

"ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET: The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing. GUILDENSTERN: A thing my lord? HAMLET: Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!" - William Shakespeare

"Sable Night, mother of Dread and Fear." - William Shakespeare

"Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"As the moths around a taper, as the bees around a rose, as the gnats around a vapour, so the spirits group and close round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Even though I overthrew twenty times, that does not make it less beautiful or less ugly to me... - A good heart helps to have a beautiful face, my boy, even if the person is monstrous. Did you know that a heart is hardened able to make the most beautiful person in a real monster." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!" - Emma Goldman

"History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself." - Eudora Welty

"You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in spiritual direction. Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters." - Eugene Peterson

"Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Prayer in the hour of need is a great boon. From simple trials to our Gethsemanes, prayer can put us in touch with God, our greatest source of comfort and counsel." - Ezra Taft Benson

"So many countries, so many customs." - Italian Proverbs