Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Sholem Asch, born Szalom Asz, also written Shalom Asch

Polish-born American Jewish Novelist, Dramatist and Essayist in Yiddish

"It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say."

"The lash may force men to physical labor; it cannot force them to spiritual creativity."

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

"The best security for old age: respect your children."

"I can see no hope for our unhappy world save that which lies in the renewal of the moral and spiritual values which our common ideal of faith has created."

"Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway."

"I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air."

"Heritage is Scriptures . . . which have become absorbed into our blood."

"Every dawn renews the Beginning, and to behold the earth struggling out of the formless void, out of the night, is to witness the act of creation."

"The sword conquered for a while, but the spirit conquers forever!"

"Without a love of humankind there is no love of God."

"An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision."

"The heathen spirit is wingless. It cannot lift itself to heights from which the totality of being is visible, and it therefore loses itself in details."

"It's alright--there are many avenues, many corridors of the soul that are dark also."

"Youth has the resilience to absorb disaster and weave it into the pattern of its life, no matter how anguishing the thorn that penetrates its flesh."

"To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are."

"He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do: and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him."

"By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering."

"In mine opinion, love is fitter than fear, gentleness better than beating, to bring up a child rightly in learning."

"It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience."

"Let the master praise him, and say, 'Here ye do well.' For, I assure you, there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning, as is praise."

"Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty."

"In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry."

"Mark all mathematical heads which be wholly and only bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, how unapt to serve the world."

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness."

"Suffering, my son, is the fount of love. Suffering is the grace, the great grace, which our Father in heaven pours down upon us. For suffering gives men submissive hearts. He that does not suffer thinks that he stands upon a mighty rock which he himself has raised. He does not see his brother; he sees only himself. He believes in no one; he believes only in his own strength. His heart becomes a swamp which swarms with reptiles: pride, obstinacy, and self-love. And when his footstool is rolled away from under him, he sinks, together with all the reptiles, into the depths of hell. But he to whom God has granted suffering shall find his pains like ropes which bind him to his Father in heaven. His heart is awake to feel the pains of his brother in need. He sends afflictions upon you and makes you small on earth that you may be great in heaven."

"Personality is the gland of creativity."

"There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise."

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."

"To speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do is style."

"The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write."

"Young children were sooner allured by love, than driven by beating, to attain good learning."