Great Throughts Treasury

"I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It all comes down to one simple question: Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever--or not?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall briefly express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"I know I am but mortal and so therewhilst prepare myself for death, whensoever it shall please God to send it." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue." - Dorothy Parker

"Besides, he's MINE, and I want the triumph of seeing MY descendant fairly lord of their estates; my child hiring their children to till their fathers' lands for wages. That is the sole consideration which can make me endure the whelp: I despise him for himself, and hate him for the memories he revives! But that consideration is sufficient: he's as safe with me, and shall be tended as carefully as your master tends his own." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"They DO live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface, change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here almost possible; and I was a fixed unbeliever in any love of a year's standing." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?" - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"God is still in business. All that you have to do is to realize the Presence of God where the trouble seems to be, to do your nearest duty to the very best of your ability; and to keep an even mind until the storm is over." - Emmet Fox

"A honey tongue, a heart of gall." - English Proverbs

"Jenny, if you're so con­vinced I'm a loser, why did you bull­doze me into buy­ing you cof­fee?' She looked me straight in the eye and smiled. 'I like your body,' she said." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"Every day above earth is a good day." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"He thought of all the time in his life he had spent gambling." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I was blown up while we were eating cheese." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Scott told me about the Riviera and how my wife and I must come there' the next summer and how we would go there and how he would find a place for us that was not expensive and we would both work hard every day and swim and lie on the beach and be brown and only have a single aperitif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda would be happy there, he said. She loved to swim and was a beautiful diver and she was happy with that life and would want him to work and everything would be disciplined. He and Zelda and their daughter were going to go there that summer. I was trying to get him to write his stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"She's vicious,' Miss Stein said. 'She's truly vicious, so she can never be happy except with new people. She corrupts people." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Who has burnt himself with soup will blow on water as well." - Estonian Proverbs

"Who is angry with one is angry with the other." - Estonian Proverbs

"Speaking on the near skepticism of the study of the history of philosophy:" - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"LAVINIA: He made me feel for the first time in my life that everything about love could be sweet and natural... I have a right to love!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Let us be friends then from this out" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love? Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Why canÂ’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. YouÂ’ll find what youÂ’re trying to say in him- as youÂ’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' 'Fine! ThatÂ’s beautiful. But I wasnÂ’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so letÂ’s drink up and forget it. ThatÂ’s more my idea." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Well, it's been the monopolizing of great wealth, which tends to happen in basically unjust societies and undemocratic societies. We have plenty of would-be democrats, would-be liberals, and would-be progressives. But how do you organize? The Democratic Party is a machine to get votes for its people, none of who should probably be elected to the high offices of state. That's all. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked and might well be outlawed one of these days. Le Pen, you know, in France, who is an out-and-out fascist, the French have managed in some clever way to contain him. I mean, he's always running for president; his votes never seem to show up. I don't know how they do it, but we've got to do that with the Republican base, the religious right. We don't want them running the country. Nobody does. Certainly not the founding fathers. And I think we have to ride herd on them and make sure they do not seize the state." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedomÂ’s land much less braveryÂ’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!" -

"How to re-light the fire the very ashes of which are scattered?" -

"Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth – if you have any. Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it." -

"Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings." -

"Good is towing the line, being behaved, being quiet, being passive, fitting in, being likedÂ… Great is being messy, having a belly, speaking your mind, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for another paradigm, not letting people talk you out of what you know to be true." -

"The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others." - Felix Adler

"Two women and a goose make a market." -