Great Throughts Treasury

"Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised. Usually it implies some risk — especially in new undertakings. Courage to initiate something and to keep it going, pioneering and adventurous spirit to blaze new ways, often, in our land of opportunity." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end. He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner. Born of necessity, the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry. He provided the means for expanding our organization to its present dimensions and for extending the medium of cartoon animation toward new entertainment levels. He spelled production liberation for us." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"Our contribution to television is entertainment, created without deviation from our conception of what entertainment should be." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"Our part in things is to build along the lines we are known for, with happy family stories and comedies. I've never thought of this as art. It's part of show-business." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"All achievement should be measured in human happiness." - Walter Lippmann

"We often fancy that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love." - Walter Savage Landor

"Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"The more you see yourself as what you'd like to become, and act as if what you want is already there, the more you'll activate those dormant forces that will collaborate to transform your dream into your reality." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"You have a one of a kind gift to offer this world, and you are unique in the entire history of creation." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"You will find yourself believing there is nothing you cannot accomplish if you put your mind to it and believe it. This is the inner circuitry of a miracle worker." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The greatest barrier to own healing is not the pain, sorrow or violence inflicted upon us as children. Our greatest hindrance is our ongoing capacity to judge, to criticize, and to bring tremendous harm to ourselves. If we can harden our heart against ourselves and meet our most tender feelings with anger and condemnation, we simultaneously armor our heart against the possibility of gentleness, love and healing." - Wayne Muller

"The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable." - Wendell Berry

"Food was his public love, his private lust" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"There will never be peace." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"I didn't squawk about the steak, dear. I merely said I didn't see that old horse that used to be tethered outside here." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"No thing that's truly me, a bootless waste, a waste of myself and them, for my life is mine and theirs presumably theirs, and cannot touch." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"Every time I hear that word, I cringe. Fun! I think it's disgusting; it's just running around. It's not my idea of pleasure." - Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire

"Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"In the course of two years Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe did more to emancipate women and to make their status equal to that of the “strong” sex than all the advanced, enlightened, “democratic” republics of the world did in the course of 130 years." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Parents teach in the toughest school in the world — The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor." - Virginia Satir

"Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"In doubt if an action is just, abstain." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag." - Victor Hugo

"What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these things are things that cannot inspire envy." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"True-knowledge brings good health, strength and long life to a man." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"You shall not obtain this human body again; make the effort - try to achieve liberation." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither... can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard." - Václav Havel

"If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The world is a living image of God." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"Imperfect knowledge is the parent of doubt: thorough and honest research dispels it." - Tryon Edwards

"Thoughts lead on to purpose, purpose leads on to actions, actions form habits, habits decide character, and character fixes our destiny." - Tryon Edwards

"True art is reverent imitation of God." - Tryon Edwards

"The one who enters a Turkish bath sweats. (Used to point out that one's actions determine the consequences and therefore one should not complain about them later.)" - Turkish Proverbs

"If one fourth of the capital of a country were suddenly destroyed, or entirely transferred to a different part of the world, without any other cause occurring of a diminished demand for commodities, this scantiness of capital would certainly occasion great inconvenience to consumers, and great distress among the working classes; but it would be attended with great advantages to the remaining capitalists." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"I am inclined to follow the course suggested by a friend of mine who says that he has always followed the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide, and clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but surely." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this find everything hostile to him." - Thucydides NULL