Great Throughts Treasury

"The tragedy of the time .. That there is no moment in which repeated twice .. But it is a perennial river where the water is changing continuously and non-stop." - Mustapha Mahmoud

"What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world." - Nadine Gordimer

"The tragedy is that so many people look for self-confidence and respect everywhere except within themselves, so they fail in their search." - Nathaniel Branden

"No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique. " - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman

"I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it. " - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman

"The traditional religious rituals are important; it makes us partners in the experience of others Assembly of worship and prayer. But we must never forget the experience of spiritual experience of love is the first process and not in the rules of love… Traditional religions’ practices are important. They allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer, but we must never forget spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love, and with love, there are no rules some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior, others may turn to reading books of advice from experts on relationships but this is all folly. The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters… We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation… Tragedy always brings about radical change in our lives, a change that is associated with the same principle: loss. " - Paulo Coelho

"Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"His consuming interest remains in the world of men, their institutions, their history, their passions. And because he is interested in men, nothing that men do can be altogether tedious...He will naturally be interested in the events that engage men’s ultimate beliefs, their moments of tragedy and grandeur and ecstasy. But he will also be fascinated by the commonplace, the everyday. He will know reverence, but this reverence will not prevent him from wanting to see and to understand. He may sometimes feel revulsion or contempt , but this will also not deter him from wanting to have his questions answered. ...in his quest for understanding, moves through the world of men without respect for the usual lines of demarcation. Nobility ad degradation, power and obscurity, intelligence and folly -- these are equally interesting to him, however unequal they may be in his personal values or tastes. This his questions may lead him to all possible levels of society, the best and least known places, the most respected and the most despised. ...he will find himself in all these places because his own questions have so taken possession of him that he has little choice but to seek for answers." - Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger

"There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life. " - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"We are all called upon to do everything possible to banish from society not only the tragedy of war but also every violation of human rights, beginning with the indisputable right to life, which every person enjoys from the very moment of conception." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives." - Albert Einstein

"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

"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." - Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans

"I think it would be a great tragedy ... if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line. I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash." - Rita Mae Brown

"I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right." - Rita Mae Brown

"Most tax revisions didn't improve the system, they made it more like Washington itself complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added" - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"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

"Included in this almost nothing, as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet—an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The parasite has somehow evolved to turn off the host's defenses, presumably by disarming the crab's immune response with some chemical trickery that fools the host into accepting the parasite as part of itself. ...The adult parasite castrates the host, not by directly eating the gonadal tissue, but by some unknown mechanism probably involving penetration of the interna's roots around and into the crab's nervous system." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with at stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)" - Stephan Jay Gould

"If you are animated by right principles, and are fully awakened to the true dignity of life, the subject of amusements may be left to settle itself." - Theodore T. Munger

"But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant." - Thomas Paine

"There are two great days in a person's life -- the day we are born and the day we discover why." - William Barclay

"Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?" - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"Die goldene Medina. The accent was not on the golden (except in the sense of some mysterious Light), but on the Medina - that is, the city of hope, the city of deliverance." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"The Wizard of Oz (M. G. M.) should settle an old Hollywood controversy: whether fantasy can be presented on the screen as successfully with human actors as with cartoons." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge." - Wilhelm Reich

"They called it golf because all the other four letter words were taken." - Walter Hagen, fully Sir Walter Charles Hagen

"The war for liberty never ends. One day liberty has to be defended against the power of wealth, on another day against the intrigues of politicians, on another against the dead hand of bureaucrats, on another against the patriot and the militarist, on another against the profiteer, and then against the hysteria and the passions of the mobs, against obscurantism and stupidity, against the criminal and against the over-righteous. In this campaign every civilized man is enlisted till he dies, and he only has known the full joy of living who somewhere and at some time has struck a decisive blow for the freedom of the human spirit." - Walter Lippmann

"Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society" - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The deer and the dachshund are one. Well, the gods grow out of the weather. The people grow out of the weather; the gods grow out of the people. Encore, encore, encore les dieux." - Wallace Stevens

"Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The dry high spirits of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists look damp and depressed." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"There is none to question Me if I do not act; there is nothing I would lose if I do not engage in activity. Nor have I any great urge to be active. But yet, you see Me very active. The reason is, I must be doing something all the time, for your sake, as an example, as an inspiration, as a piece of training." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said." - Václav Havel

"Anger is the enemy which takes one’s life. Anger is enemy with the face of a friend. Anger is like a very sharp sword. Anger destroys everything." - Valmiki NULL

"Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now--to quote myself at my most pretentious--is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste. For example, the freedom (hooray!) to say almost anything you want on television about society's problems has been co-opted (alas!) by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc., etc., and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called "adult" language. Irreverence is easy--what's hard is wit." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer

"We are constantly thinking of the great war… which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I think people are entitled to march without a permit. When you have a few hundred thousand people on the street you have permission." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"Ah, this thou shouldst have done and not have spoke on ’t! In me ’tis villainy, in thee ’t had been good service. Thou must know, ’tis not my profit that does lead mine honor; mine honor, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown, I should have found it afterwards well done, but must condemn it now. Desist, and drink. Antony and Cleopatra, Act ii, Scene 7" - William Shakespeare

"An honest woman's son, for indeed my father did something smack, something grow to, he had a kind of taste." - William Shakespeare

"And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." - William Shakespeare