Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Strength

"You may possess the power and might of a world ruler, but unless you gain mastery over your own mind, when the time of death arrives you still haven’t attained the power of freedom. So gain mastery over your mind!" - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"Not me, of course, as I am now officially a spinster librarian and must stay home with my cat and drink tea." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

"Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply." - Elias Canetti

"I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples." - Elif Safak

"So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering against my tremulous hands which loose the string and let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, -- he wished to have me in his sight once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring to come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! -- this... the paper's light... said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailed as if God's future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paled with lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed if, what this said, I dared repeat at last!" - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Although my royal rank causes me to doubt whether my kingdom is not more sought after than myself, yet I understand that you have found other graces in me." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"Madame d'Estampes and Madame de Valentinois make me fear that I should be only honoured by my husband as a queen and not loved by him as a woman." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"Grief is the price we pay for love." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong. But I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under their skins." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"The Jewish God's symbol vocalizes the reality of an all-encompassing and controlling "Justice," the One world-power, the all- pervading world-process, the all-shaping world-purpose. This Power, Process, and Purpose, conceived and carried out in Love, is an end unto itself, but man is a means to it. By making this purpose his own day's intention man gives music and value to his life." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

"How dreary — to be — Somebody! How public — like a Frog — to tell one's name — the livelong June -To an admiring Bog." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"And cried for mamma, at every turn'-I added, 'and trembled if a country lad heaved his fist against you, and sat at home all day for a shower of rain.-Oh, Heathcliff, you are showing a poor spirit! Come to the glass, and I'll let you see what you should wish. Do you mark those two lines between your eyes, and those thick brows, that instead of rising arched, sink in the middle, and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them, like devil's spies? Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles, to raise your lids frankly, and change the fiends to confident, innocent angels, suspecting and doubting nothing, and always seeing friends where they are not sure of foes-Don't get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet, hates all the world, as well as the kicker, for what it suffers.' 'In other words, I must wish for Edgar Linton's great blue eyes, and even forehead,' he replied. 'I do - and that won't help me to them.' 'A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,' I continued, 'if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly. And now that we've done washing, and combing, and sulking - tell me whether you don't think yourself rather handsome? I'll tell you, I do. You're fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer!" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn't love you as much as I do in a single day." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you. . . If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it." - Emmet Fox

"The poor in spirit suffer from none of these embarrassments, either because they never had them, or because they have risen above them on the tide of spiritual understanding. They have got rid of the love of money and property, of fear of public opinion, and of the disapproval of relatives or friends. They are no longer overawed by human authority, however august. They are no longer cocksure in their own opinions. They have come to see that their most cherished beliefs may have been and probably were mistaken, and that all their ideas and views of life may be false and in need of recasting. They are ready to start again at the very beginning and learn life anew." - Emmet Fox

"The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels." - Erich Auerbach

"But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"He killed more men than the cholera." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The poor can be helped to help themselves, but only by making available to them a technology that recognizes the economic boundaries and limitations of poverty—an intermediate technology." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The future battle on the ground will be preceded by battle in the air. This will determine which of the contestants has to suffer operational and tactical disadvantages and be forced throughout the battle into adoption compromise solutions." - Erwin Rommel, fully Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel

"To live is to hope and wait." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on — in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. I come to seek God because I need Him, may be an adequate formula for prayer. I come to adore His splendor, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet, is the only possible formula for worship." - Evelyn Underhill

"If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time." - Evelyn Underhill

"He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr. Pinfold maintained, most men harbor the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters — Dickens and Balzac even — were flagrantly guilty." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"When I face an issue of great import that cleaves both constituents and colleagues, I always take the same approach. I engage in deep deliberation and quiet contemplation. I wait to the last available minute and then I always vote with the losers. Because, my friend, the winners never remember and the losers never forget." - Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen

"Beloved youth, you will have your trials and temptations through which you must pass, but there are great moments of eternity which lie ahead. You have our love and our confidence. We pray that you will be prepared for the reins of leadership. We say to you, "Arise and shine forth" and be a light unto the world, a standard to others." - Ezra Taft Benson

"History is not an accident. Events are foreknown to God. His superintending influence is behind the actions of his righteous children. Long before America was even discovered, the Lord was moving and shaping events that would lead to the coming forth of the remarkable form of government established by the Constitution. America had to be free and independent to fulfill this destiny." - Ezra Taft Benson

"Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence." - Faith Baldwin

"The future and strength of the race is for women to be able to have kids when they want them and to love and provide them with the tools they'll need to get through a hostile world. The image of the black woman bearing child upon child against her will is the real threat to the race." - Faye Wattleton

"This is not a debate about abortion. This is about a fundamental right to make choices about our sexuality -- without the encroachment of a president, the Supreme Court, and certainly without the encroachment of politicians!" - Faye Wattleton

"The family is the school of duties... founded on love." - Felix Adler

"With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady?s album ? and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say." - Gustave Flaubert

"The first blow is as good as two." - Italian Proverbs

"I thought up an ending for my book. ?And he lives happily ever after, till the end of his days.?" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien