Great Throughts Treasury

"The morning is not the time to praise a fine day." - Welsh Proverbs

"By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any "political liberties" that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject." - Wendell Berry

"The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment." - Wendell Berry

"The world is whole beyond human knowing." - Wendell Berry

"Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbor completely." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Man (to WC): You're drunk! WC: Yeah, and you're crazy. And I'll be sober tomorrow and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"There's not a man in America who at one time or another hasn't had a secret desire to boot a child in the ass." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"Energy then is morally neutral, it is good or bad depending on the direction it takes. Our task is to provide legitimate outlets for it. The provision of such outlets is important in three ways - for society, for the individual and for the learning of subjects. For any society that wishes to remain civilized this is the highest priority; only by providing satisfactory activities for all citizens can delinquency, vandalism, crime and violence become exceptional rather than normal. This is a priority of which our dominant institutions seem totally unaware. For the individual, finding a satisfactory outlet for energy means a sense of fulfillment and escape from frustration. For the learning of subjects it is the driving force without which little will be learned." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"It is well known that there exists a mathematical theory of musical sounds. Very few people know that music has made a contribution to mathematics. In fact a suggestion made by a musician led to a total revolution in the way mathematicians approach their subject. No doubt, mathematicians would have made this step forward sooner or later if the musician had not given this hint, but as a matter of historical record, that was how it happened." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"We can go a stage beyond talking about things and drawing pictures of things by arranging for the actual handling of things. There is evidence that this greatly increases the proportion of the population capable of learning mathematics and this evidence is on a mass scale." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"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

"Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them." - Wallace Stevens

"You took me weak and unprepared. I had not thought that you who shared my days, my nights, my heart, my life, would slash me with a naked knife and gently tell me not to bleed but to accept your crazy creed." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

"Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers… Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks"." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes)." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture — the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture (look, Lord, at these chains!) that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The sky was so heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes -- telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression -- that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline ... it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen. A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals." - Virginia Satir

"It is easy to see how adolescence becomes so frustrating, and old age so abhorrent, to many people. The life line is disempowered at two major points: at the beginning and at the end. The only acceptable place is in the middle. Power is conferred only on adults. It is denied to youth and seniors." - Virginia Satir

"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

"So much is asked of parents, and so little is given." - Virginia Satir

"We can learn something new anytime we believe we can." - Virginia Satir

"So there was really sorry, had absolutely nothing, except the sin for which human nature condemned him to death, the sin of not feeling." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"You will be aware when your wish to be aware is stronger than your wish to be unaware." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within." - Victor Hugo

"The circumstances of happiness are not enough; there must be peace of mind." - Victor Hugo

"The sickness of a nation does not kill Man." - Victor Hugo

"Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"The body is false, but they believe it to be true; it is like a dream in the night." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The Creator Himself has created the universe; He Himself shall destroy it." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"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

"In art, 'good enough' is not good enough." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin