Great Throughts Treasury

"You have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life" - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"If there is only one earring among seven daughters, there will always be a quarrel on festival days." - Tibetan Proverbs

"Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son? 'Tis full three months since I did see him last." - William Shakespeare

"Come, give us a taste of your quality." - William Shakespeare

"Come, we have a hot venison pasty to dinner. I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here. All’s Well That Ends Well, Act iv, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare

"Who shall tax successful villainy, or call the rising traitor to account?" - William Havard

"He that seeks God in everything is sure to find God in everything. When we thus live wholly unto God, God is wholly ours and we are then happy in all the happiness of God; for by uniting with Him in heart, and will, and spirit, we are united to all that He is and has in Himself. This is the purity and perfection of life that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer, that God's kingdom may come and His will be done in us, as it is in Heaven. And this we may be sure is not only necessary, but attainable by us." - William Law

"Never do anything through strife, or emulation, or vainglory. Never do anything in order to excel other people, but in order to please God, and because it is His will that you should do everything in the best manner that you can." - William Law

"Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world: It is not he who prays most or fasts most, it is not he who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for it." - William Law

"Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization." - William Morris

"When you keep company with an eminent master, his qualities will automatically influence you." - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"But what a horrible world 'society' is." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"It is easy to be pleasant when life flows by like a song, but the man worthwhile is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong. For the test of the heart is trouble, and it always comes with years, and the smile that is worth the praises of earth is the smile that shines through the tears." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes." - Emile Zola

"The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind." - Emma Goldman

"And now, if you still press the question, why should God make provision for forgiveness, to an extent he knew would be unnecessary, and be guilty of an expenditure of means beyond what the well-known circumstances of the case required, We answer, by referring you to the characteristic of universality, to which we have already adverted, as marking his dispensations in the natural world, and ask you why his sun shines and wastes its beams upon sightless eye-balls, or upon those who will not open their eyes to behold his goodly rays? Why does he send his rains upon the barren rock, or waste his showers upon the sandy and sterile soil, in which the seed can never vegetate? If I propose this question, you tell me in reply, that I mistake altogether the nature of God’s creations, and the general principles of the system which he has established. You tell me that the necessity for the sun being what it is, does not depend upon the number of the persons who are to be enlightened by his rays, but grows out of the fact that it must be what it is to give light to any one–that atmospheric laws are general, and cannot in their nature be so arranged as to secure the descent of rain only where it will render the earth productive. You cannot consider that there is any waste of light or moisture, because there are some who do not see, or because in some places the surface of the earth presents the impervious rock to the rains of heaven." - Erskine Mason

"For we may ask in return, what has any secret purpose to do with our role of judgment and action? “Secret things,” we are told, “belong unto the Lord our God; but things which are revealed, unto us and to our children.” The question taken from the hidden purposes of the divine mind, can have no force whatever, because it is an appeal to our ignorance. We know, and can know nothing about them. One thing, however, we do know. God must be always and everywhere consistent with himself; and whether we can understand it or not, it is certain that there can be no inconsistency between revealed and unrevealed truths; and if God has made an offer of eternal life through the atonement unto all men, and commanded all men to embrace it, there cannot be in any purpose of God concerning its nature, anything which will clash with, and so contradict this universal offer." - Erskine Mason

"Down on your knees, and thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love." - Euripedes NULL

"I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"A sister they had, Galadriel, most beautiful of all the house of Finw‰; her hair was lit with gold as though it had caught in a mesh the radiance of Laurelin." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien