Great Throughts Treasury

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

Taste

"There are lovers content with longing. I’m not one of them." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Who says words with my mouth? All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home. This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Whoever acts with respect will get respect." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved." - Russell Lynes, fully Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.

"The true snob never rests: there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon." - Russell Lynes, fully Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.

"Though I should speak with the tongue of men and of angels, and have not charity, nor show to my neighbor an example of virtue, I should be of little service to him, and none to myself." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL

"Natural science does not consist in ratifying what others have said, but in seeking the causes of phenomena." - Saint Albertus Magnus, aka "Doctor Universalis", Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus and Albert of Cologne, "the teacher of everything there is to know"

"It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself." - Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech

"Disease generally begins that equality which death completes; the distinctions which set one man so much above another are very little perceived in the gloom of a sick-chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued; where the highest and brightest of mortal being finds nothing left behind him but the consciousness of innocence." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Don’t be too hasty... to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"No man hates him at whom he can laugh." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Kr?s?n?a is our most intimate master, friend, father or son and object of conjugal love. Forgetting Kr?s?n?a, we have created so many objects of questions and answers, but none of them are able to give us complete satisfaction. All things—but Kr?s?n?a—give temporary satisfaction only, so if we are to have complete satisfaction we must take to the questions and answers about Kr?s?n?a." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL

"The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either a saint or a mediocrity." - Simone Weil

"A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"If the feminine issue is so absurd, it is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."" - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"The divine Instructor is trustworthy, adorned as He is with three of the fairest ornament-knowledge, benevolence, and authority of utterance: with knowledge, for He is the paternal wisdom: 'All Wisdom is from the Lord, and with Him for evermore;' with authority of utterance, for He is God and Creator: 'For all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made;' and with benevolence, for He alone gave Himself a sacrifice for us." - Clement of Alexandria, originally Titus Flavius Clemens NULL

"But personality exclusive features that thought and follow the path trodden by mediocrity." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"Gaskell could not abide this indecorous version of his beloved linear progress theory. He could not bear to imagine that the grand procession from jellyfish to man, orchestrated by an ever-increasing mass of nervous tissue, once paused in its stately and orderly march toward human consciousness in order to execute a fancy little flip, a clever jig of inversion, just at the sublime and definitive moment of entrance into the vertebral home stretch." - Stephan Jay Gould

"As both capitalist and communist states -- not to mention the technological world --have evolved under the illusion that men purposefully built them, ideological optimism seeps into every niche of our lives. It is made worse by mass culture which feeds our" - Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey

"Few for heaven would care, should they be ever happy." - Thomas Dekker

"A man must needs smarte whan irous thoughtes occupy his hearte. [irate]" - Thomas Hood

"Are there so few inquietudes tacked to this momentary life of ours that we must need be loading ourselves with a thousand more?" - Thomas Jefferson

"He undressed, lay down, put out the light. Two names he whispered into his pillow, the few chaste northern syllables that meant for him his true and native way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling. He looked back on the years that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with intellect and introspection, ravaged and paralysed by insight, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two extremes, flung to and from between austerity and lust; raffiné, impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies; erring, forsaken, martyred, and ill -- and sobbed with nostalgia and remorse." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him. It “consents,” so to speak, to His creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree." - Thomas Merton

"Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between “things” and “God” as if God were another “thing” and as if His creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached form ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. This is an entirely new perspective which many sincerely moral and ascetic minds fail utterly to see." - Thomas Merton

"I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within." - Thomas Merton

"One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favor of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right." - Thomas Merton

"The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error." - Thomas Merton

"The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life." - Thomas Merton

"We do not want to be beginners [at prayer], but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!" - Thomas Merton

"Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire." - Thomas Merton

"It is the nature of man to overrate present evil and to underrate present good; to long for what he has not, and to be dissatisfied with what he has." - Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

"When a man grumbles about the drudgery of his lot, then I am entitled to conclude that he has not learned the discipline of work, and that it is native indolence rather than suppressed genius which chafes against the limitations of his environment. Browning, in his poem of The Statue and the Bust, has laid down the doctrine that it is a man’s wisdom to contend to the uttermost even for the meanest prize that may be within his reach, because by such strenuous contention manhood grows, and by the lack of it manhood decays." - W. J. Dawson. fully William James Dawson

"I would rather see words out on their own, away from their families and the warehouse of Roget wandering the world where they sometimes fall in love with a completely different word." - William Collins

"Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest, a cassocked huntsman and a fiddling priest!" - William Cowper

"Solitude, seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave; a sepulchre in which the living lie, where all good qualities grow sick and die." - William Cowper

"If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we are at no loss to perceive that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"You see, all these laws that they are having so much trouble wondering if they are constitutional, they were all drawn up by lawyers. For almost two-thirds of the membership of the House and Senate are lawyers." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind" - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"A talkative bird will not build a nest. - West African Proverb" -

"Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings." - Walter Lippmann

"I entreat you, Alfred Tennyson, come and share my haunch of venison. I have too a bin of claret, good, but better when you share it. Tho' 'tis only a small bin, there's a stock of it within. And as sure as I'm a rhymer, half a butt of Rudeheimer. Come; among the sons of men is one welcomer than Alfred Tennyson?" - Walter Savage Landor

"To write as your sweet mother does is all you wish to do. Play, sing, and smile for others, Rose! Let others write for you. Or mount again your Dartmoor grey, and I will walk beside, until we reach that quiet bay which only hears the tide. Then wave at me your pencil, then at distance bid me stand, before the cavern’d cliff, again the creature of your hand. And bid me then go past the nook to sketch me less in size; there are but few content to look so little in your eyes. Delight us with the gifts you have, and wish for none beyond: to some be gay, to some be grave, to one (blest youth!) be fond. Pleasures there are how close to Pain, and better unpossest! Let poetry’s too throbbing vein lie quiet in your breast." - Walter Savage Landor

"The tongue is the only instrument that gets sharper with use." - Washington Irving

"There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature." - Washington Irving

"A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts cried out in dismay at what the god had wrought to please her son, the strong iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles who would not live long." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden