Great Throughts Treasury

"To seek without finding, equals waste of time." - Egyptian Proverbs

"Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply." - Elias Canetti

"We have no standard any more for anything, ever since human life is no longer the standard." - Elias Canetti

"Humility does not mean being passive and cowardly. It leads to neither fatalism nor capitulation. Quite the contrary. In humility lies strength - strength welling inside. Who humbly obey the divine nature of life, will stand in the unperturbed tranquility and peace even when the whole wide world is thrown into turmoil." - Elif Safak

"Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be shortsighted as to not able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never runs out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full." - Elif Safak

"The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practise compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone's back - not even seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouth do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time. One man's pain will hurt us all. One man's joy will make everyone smile." - Elif Safak

"When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another." - Elif Safak

"I observe that there are two entirely different theories according to which individual men seek to get on in the world. One theory leads a man to pull down everybody around him in order to climb up on them to a higher place. The other leads a man to help everybody around him in order that he may go up with them." - Elihu Root

"The United States is the leader of the free world." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole

"ROSENCRANTZ: I understand you not, my lord. HAMLET: I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET: The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing — GUILDENSTERN: A thing, my lord? HAMLET: Of nothing." - William Shakespeare

"ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET: The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing. GUILDENSTERN: A thing my lord? HAMLET: Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!" - William Shakespeare

"Dear me, how I love a library." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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

"I'd like to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: Without seeing Sicily, one can not have a clear idea of Italy ." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My guru says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it..." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The other night we talked about the terms we use while let us take comfort someone desperate. I told him in English, sometimes we say, Been there. I explained to him that the deep sadness as a specific place, with its coordinates on the map of time. When you find yourself in that forest of sorrow, you can not imagine you'll ever find a way to a better place. But, if someone fails to convince that he was in the same place, but it has left, it can sometimes bring hope." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Then, I will be a real Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can't hear someone across the street to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back Polo!" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"We can change our wives, he said. We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"You have no idea how strong my love is!" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Your tears are my prayers." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser

"Dress loose, take a great deal of exercise , and be particular about your diet and sleep sound enough, the body has a great effect on the mind." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing..." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?" - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"As the saying is, so many heads, so many wits." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"I will have here but one mistress and no master." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"I thought that prattling boys and girls would fill this empty room; that my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood's opening bloom. One child and two green graves are mine, this is God's gift to me; a bleeding, fainting, broken heart— This is my gift to Thee." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission." - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

"To me, the raveled sleeve of care is never more painlessly knitted up than in an evening alone in a chair snug yet copious, with a good light and an easily held little volume sloppily printed and bound in inexpensive paper. I do not ask much of it - which is just as well, for that is all I get. It does not matter if I guess the killer, and if I happen to discover, along around page 208, that I have read the work before, I attribute the fact not to the less than arresting powers of the author, but to my own lazy memory. I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people." - Dorothy Parker

"A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen." - Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

"Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves." - Emil M. Cioran

"What a small dwelling joy can live." - Émile Souvestre

"It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches." - Emile Zola

"Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!" - Emile Zola

"This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women." - Emile Zola

"The great and inspiring aims of the Revolution became so clouded with and obscured by the methods used by the ruling political power that it was hard to distinguish what was temporary means and what final purpose. Psychologically and socially the means necessarily influence and alter the aims. The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization. In that lies the real tragedy of the Bolshevik philosophy as applied to the Russian Revolution. May this lesson not be in vain." - Emma Goldman

"The law of circulation is a Cosmic Law. That means that it is true everywhere and on all planes. The law is that constant rhythmical movement is necessary to health and harmony. Now the opposite of circulation is congestion, and it may be said that all sickness, in harmony, or trouble of any kind is really due to some form of congestion. If you think this subject out for yourself you will be fascinated to find how generally true it is, and in what unexpected places it appears. Much ill health is due to emotional congestion. This leads to congestion of the nerve, blood, and lymphatic fluids, producing disease. The depression belief under which the country labored for ten years was a case of congestion. There was plenty of raw material, machinery, and skill, and a very wide- spread demand for goods; but a case of congestion occurred! The dust bowl trouble and its allied misfortune, the floods, is, of course, an example of congestion. War itself is really due to frustrated circulation on many planes of existence. Some students of metaphysics shut their minds to the reception of new truth, and this always produces mental congestion and a failure to demonstrate. You should treat yourself two or three times a week for free circulation on all planes-by claiming that God is bringing this about." - Emmet Fox

"God comes through the wound': Our very imperfections—what religion labels our 'sins,' what therapy calls our 'sickness,' what philosophy terms our 'errors'—are precisely what bring us closer to the reality that no matter how hard we try to deny it, we are not the ones in control here. And this realization, inevitably and joyously, brings us closer to 'God'." - Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham

"I cannot believe that God would make to a sinner in his wants and his woes the tender of a relief which did not exist, or which he did not wish him to embrace; I cannot believe that God would command his creatures to embrace a provision which had never been made for them, or sanction by the peril of one’s everlasting interests a commandment which he never meant should be obeyed, and which itself precluded the possibility of obedience." - Erskine Mason

"Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom explicitly recognizes egoboo (the enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity." - Eric S. Raymond

"He had then warned his daughter not to violate the Eleventh Commandment. Which one is that? I asked her. Do not bullshit thy father, she said." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"In all honesty, men changed a few rules when they became what was referred to as househusbands. Bill didn't make beds, cook, dust, do laundry, windows or floors, or give birth. What he did do was pay bills, call people to fix the plumbing, handle the investments and taxes, volunteer big time, take papers to the garage, change license plates, get the cars serviced, and pick up the cleaning. If women had had that kind of schedule, who knows, we'd probably still be in the home." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste