Great Throughts Treasury

"As we sit today, it is important to remember we are talking about the future of a member of our family, not a strange creature that lives in the jungle." - Richard Leakey, fully Richard Erskine Frere Leakey

"The greatest tragedy in the world is a divided church. We must come together. So don't start talking about doctrine, because if you do, we shall be divided. But there is one thing we can do. We may not be able to agree about doctrine, but we can always pray together. " - Lloyd Jones

"Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on a date." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.? You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold?; comes at long last over everyone." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"In some people spiritual consciousness has already been awakened; but they have special marks. They do not enjoy hearing or talking about anything but God. They are like the chatak, which prays for rain-water though the seven oceans, the Ganges, the Jamuna, and the rivers near it are all filled with water. It won't drink anything but rain-water, even though its throat is burning with thirst." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"Through selfless work, love of God grows in the heart. Then through his grace one realize him in course of time. God can be seen. One can talk to him as I am talking to you." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

"The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly: he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: Do you like your life he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: Can you not like it?" - Randall Jarrell

"To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil." - Raoul Vaneigem

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about." - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury

"The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal. Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore." - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury

"I don't believe in saturation. We're thinking and talking worldwide." - Ray Kroc, fully Raymond Albert Kroc

"If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way " - Ray Kroc, fully Raymond Albert Kroc

"Visions of McDonald's restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain. I don't believe in saturation. We're thinking and talking worldwide." - Ray Kroc, fully Raymond Albert Kroc

"There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West

"Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries." - René Descartes

"She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten." - Richard Grant White

"Minding your own business includes [avoiding] eavesdropping, gossiping, talking behind other people s backs, and analyzing or trying to figure out other people." - Richard Carlson

"For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subversient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the soup in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of the many possible kinds of evoluton." - Richard Dawkins

"For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye." - Richard Dawkins

"So to the book's provocation, the statement that nearly half the people in the United States don't believe in evolution. Not just any people but powerful people, people who should know better, people with too much influence over educational policy. We are not talking about Darwin's particular theory of natural selection. It is still (just) possible for a biologist to doubt its importance, and a few claim to. No, we are here talking about the fact of evolution itself, a fact that is proved utterly beyond reasonable doubt. To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." - Richard Dawkins

"We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humoring it as a piece of harmless fun." - Richard Dawkins

"What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world. If we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do? It is trying to get more numerous in the gene pool. Basically it does this by helping to Program the bodies in which it finds itself to survive and to reproduce. But now we are emphasizing that 'it' is a distributed agency, existing in many different individuals at once. The key point of this chapter is that a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness. it still seems rather implausible." - Richard Dawkins

"The first ... has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions " - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, 'You don't know what you are talking about!' The second one says 'What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?' and so on." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"Retirement? You're talking about death, right?" - Robert Altman, fully Robert Bernard Altman

"Most of the arguments to which I am party fall somewhat short of being impressive, knowing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about" - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley

"I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead." - Rose Macauley, fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay

"I am so happy, I cannot be contained in the world; But like a spirit, I am hidden from the eyes of the world." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Now I am sober and there's only the hangover and the memory of love." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief." - Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake

"A man should not be struck when he is down. (Never hit an opponent who has fallen, do not attact or hurt a person in misfortune who cannot fight back)" - Russian Proverbs

"Fish which always live in the depths of the ocean lose some of their faculties, like the Tibetan hermits who always live in the dark. The ostrich loses his power of flying because he does not use his wings. Therefore do not bury the gifts and talents which have been given to you, but use them, that you may enter into the joy of your Lord." - Sadhu Sundar Singh

"When you suddenly command some unusual, unexpected course of action, then even if it is something you have hitherto forbidden, even if for the time being you conceal the reason for your behest, and even if it contravenes the accepted norms of a human society, can we doubt that it is right to obey, seeing that a human society is just precisely insofar as it serves you? Blessed are they who know that you have commanded them. Everything that is done by your servants is done either to make plain what needs to be revealed at present, or to foreshadow the future." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

"Staying where you now are, you must perish; coming to Christ, you can but perish; coming to Christ, no one ever did perish; while you sit still and starve, there is bread enough and to spare in your Father's house. Will you return?" - Samuel I. Prime, fully Samuel Irenaeus Prime

"No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, 'I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.'" - Simon Wiesenthal

"We thought we were going mad, ... Perhaps we feared (or hoped) we were mad already." - Simon Wiesenthal

"One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism." - Simone Weil

"I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I cannot appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race." - Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz

"When you see everything as the divine expression, including what you once took to belong to you—your body, your thoughts, your feelings—you move with the flow of life instead of struggling against the current." - Stephan Bodian

"However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God." - Stephen Hawking

"I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark." - Stephen Hawking

"Eve bites into the fruit. Suddenly she realizes that she is naked. She begins to cry. The kindly serpent picks up a handkerchief, gives it to her. "It's all right," he says. "The first moment is always the hardest." "But I thought knowledge would be so wonderful," Eve says, sniffling. "Knowledge?!" laughs the serpent. "This fruit is from the Tree of Life."" - Stephen Mitchell

"Rather, as he saw it now, the difficulty lay, not in the deed itself, but in the consequences which followed upon not thinking or not knowing." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"The Boor is one who, having drunk a posset, will go into the Ecclesia. He vows that thyme smells sweeter than any perfume; he wears his shoes too large for his feet; he talks in a loud voice." - Theophrastus NULL

"We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable." - Thomas Berry