Great Throughts Treasury

"They are too busy being to notice what their neighbors are doing." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Transformation is the ability and willingness to live beyond your form." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"What you think and do affects all other people." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Reality alone exists - and that we are. All the rest is only a dream, a dream of the One Mind, which is our mind without the 'our'. Is it so hard to accept? Is it so difficult to assimilate and to live?" - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.' The husband, unlike the manager or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble." - Wendell Berry

"A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy." - Wendell Berry

"Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time." - Wendell Berry

"As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections - as one is now said to work "for a living" or "to support a family" - but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love." - Wendell Berry

"If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer—and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood." - Wendell Berry

"It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits." - Wendell Berry

"It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons." - Wendell Berry

"There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Illness comes from living too small a process or too large a process." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"It's a funny old world - a man's lucky if he gets out of it alive." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"It's what you do that counts and not what you say; therefore I fired my press agent." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"Work now becomes fun. You are motivated to pay the price. You budget your time and money. You study, think, and plan. The more you think about your goals, the more enthusiastic you become. And with enthusiasm your desire turns into a burning desire." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone

"Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

"Where there is a lack of quality there is a failure to understand variation. Everything varies. Statistics help us to predict how much of which things are going to vary. It is a company's responsibility to know whether problems in excessive variation are in the design of its system or in the behavior of the people. Both can be improved." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

"Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)" - Walker Percy

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness in a landscape selected at random is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Well I think in all the thirty years I've been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it's really, it's not about what I've achieved and if I've become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today." - Vince Gill

"I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"If you hear a voice within you say "You cannot paint," then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Submit to me. So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Veiling truth in mystery." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"All troubled people, which is all people, must if they are going to be delivered from themselves, must make the concession that there is a force, an entity, a power that is higher than their own present nature." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"First I am one with my sickness. Then I stand apart and see my sickness. Then I am one with my wholeness." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Ignorance is inferior to intelligence. Intelligence is superior to ignorance." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"The intelligent reaction toward trouble is to ask, How can I think clearly toward this?" - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"The most marvelous experience of life is to transform life according to reality, not imagination." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Think about it. How would a man's day be different if he did not try to force his way through it? By not forcing anything he would avoid the tension and strife that always accompanies forcing. Forcing falls away when we clearly see it as a wrong move. We need only be conscious that anything gained by either subtle or violent force becomes just another chain." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Think for days about the following thought: Hostility serves no natural need." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Where did you ever get the notion that the spiritual rules are your enemy? The enemy in you calls them an enemy. The simple action of yielding to rightness when you don't want to yield will make you a skilled locator of lost parts inside of you." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Do not long after the departed, who conduct (men) afar. Ascend from the darkness, come to the light. We lay hold of thy hands." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"It is only those, who fail to follow My instructions and deviate from the path I lay down, that fail to get what I hold out before them. Follow My instructions and become soldiers in MY army; I will lead you on to victory." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"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

"We have all around us, in the atmosphere, the music emanating from all the Broadcasting Stations of the World, but they do not assail your ear at any time. You are not aware of any Station; but, if you have a receiver and if you tune it to the correct wavelength, you can hear the matter broadcast from any Station; if you fail to tune it correctly, you will get instead of news only nuisance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity. It's nothing to do with eternity, said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining? Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy! Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-Don't be propertarian, Takver muttered. Dear heart, don't cry. I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears. I'm cold. The moonlight's cold. Lie down. A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms. I'm afraid, Takver, he whispered." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children - though their children were, in fact happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin