Great Throughts Treasury

"I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending." - Dorothy Parker

"To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock." - Emma Goldman

"Experiences is just paying attention as time passes." - Erin McKean

"Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life." - Ernest Becker

"As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Here's a taxidermist's, Bill said. Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog? Come on, I said. You're pie-eyed. Pretty nice stuffed dogs, Bill said. Certainly brighten up your flat. Come on. Just one stuffed dog. I can take 'em or leave 'em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog. Come on. Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog. We'll get one on the way back. All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Viva my husband who was Mayor of this town." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Use any excuse you can use to feel good - and watch what happens." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"He who takes pains will get things done." - Estonian Proverbs

"Who wants to makes his friend his enemy should loan him some money." - Estonian Proverbs

"There is as much difference between the stage and the film as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both." - Ethel Barrymore

"A belt fastened while running will come undone while running." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"In forming a habit of communicating to one another this fort of ideas by actions, mankind accustomed themselves to determine them; and from that time they began to find a greater ease in connecting them with other signs." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"The language of song or vocal music is not so familiar to us, as it was to the ancients'; and that of mere instrumental performance has no longer the air of novelty, which alone has so great an effect upon the imagination." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end." - Eudora Welty

"But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself." -

"There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme." -

"Too many lives are needed to make just one." - Eugenio Montale

"Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"I don?t know,? said Frodo. ?It came to me then, as if I was making it up; but I may have heard it long ago. Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. It?s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door, he used to say. You step into the Road, and if you don?t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places? He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien