Great Throughts Treasury

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

Sterling W. Sill, fully Sterling Welling Sill

American Authority on the Latter-day Saints Church

"Wealth is not only what you have but it is also what you are."

"A story is told that Whistler once painted a tiny picture of a spray of roses. The artistry involved in the picture was magnificent. Never before, it seemed, had the art of man been able to execute quite so deftly a reproduction of the art of nature. The picture was the envy of the artists who saw it, the despair of the collectors who yearned to buy it. But Whistler refused steadfastly to sell it. 'For,' he said, 'whenever I feel that my hand has lost its cunning, whenever I doubt my ability, I look at the little picture of the spray of roses, and say to myself, Whistler, you painted that. Your hand drew it. Your imagination conceived the colors. Your skill put the roses on the canvas. Then, said he, 'I know that what I have done, I can do again.'"

"A young man came to Socrates one time and said, Mr. Socrates, I have come 1,600 miles to talk to you about wisdom and learning. He said, You are a man of wisdom and learning, and I would like to be a man of wisdom and learning. Socrates said, Come follow me, and he led the way down to the seashore. They waded out into the water up to their waists, and then Socrates turned on his friend and held his head under the water. His friend struggled and kicked and bucked and tried to get away, but Socrates held him down. Now if you hold someone's head under the water long enough, he will eventually become fairly peaceable. And after this man had stopped struggling, Socrates laid him out on the bank to dry, and he went back to the market place. After the young man had dried out a little bit, he came back to Socrates to find the reason for this rather unusual behavior. Socrates said to him, When your head was under the water, what was the one thing you wanted more than anything else? And the man said, More than anything else, I wanted air. Socrates said, All right, when you want wisdom and learning like you wanted air, you won't have to ask anybody to give it to you."

"Certainly the greatest values in the world are human values, and the most worthwhile ambitions in people have to do with building human beings. The most important responsibility that God has ever laid upon the shoulders of any human being is that of making the best and the most of his own life. I heard of somebody once who said he was interested in doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number, and that the greatest number was number one. That was himself. That may sound like a little bit of selfishness, but if that is selfishness, at least it is a very intelligent selfishness. Everyone has a right to be interested in himself, and I am confident that God wants us to be interested in ourselves first; that is, the first soul that anyone should bring to God should be his own soul. We cannot do very much for anyone else until we have first done something for ourselves. That is, it is pretty difficult to give someone else an education unless we have some education ourselves. It is pretty hard to get someone else to think unless we ourselves are thinkers."

"Each person must develop his own leadership. Leadership cannot be bought. It cannot be conferred. It cannot be inherited. It knows no divine right. It cannot be passed on by any process of succession. It is acquired only by the personal mastery of each individual aspirant."

"Everything depends on attitude. We are ambitious or lazy, enthusiastic or dull, loyal or undependable, according to our attitude. We get good grades or poor grades according to our attitudes. Discouragement is an attitude. Lack of industry is an attitude. Failure to follow instructions is an attitude."

"Fighting is not the best way to win an argument. If carried to its ultimate conclusions, the old idea of 'an eye for an eye' eventually ends in making everybody blind."

"God did not intend that we should be cowards, or delinquents, or fools, or sinners or weaklings. He created us in his own image and commanded us to be men."

"In baseball we keep an accurate record of the hits, runs, and errors of each individual player. Life is also a great game, and in life the statistics are much more important than they are in a ball game. One of our human weaknesses in life is that when we are losing the game, we dont always like to keep track of the score. Certainly we are not very enthusiastic about putting the errors down on the paper, and most people don’t even know what their individual batting average is. This makes our success much more difficult both to figure out and to attain ... we cannot separate our success from our statistics. If each day we could see what God writes in his book about our works for that day, it would certainly motivate us to make better scores."

"In Jack Dempsey's early days he had a fight contract, which paid him two dollars per fight for the fights he won. He received nothing for the fights he lost. Jack Dempsey said that in his early days he was knocked down a lot of times and he usually was tempted to stay down because he knew that no one would hit him again until he started to get up. But Jack was a hungry fighter and he knew that if he was going to eat, he must get up in order to get the two dollars. He tells of one occasion when he was knocked down 11 times in one fight, and 11 times he got up in order to win the $2."

"In the greatest sermon that was ever preached, the greatest man who ever lived gave the wisest counsel that has ever been given, in which He said, 'lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, ...' (Matthew 620.) Laying up earthly treasures is such an exciting process that we spend most of our time working at it. But Jesus pointed out some advantages to treasures in heaven. The moth and the rust cannot get at treasures in heaven quite so easily. Treasures in heaven are more permanent. They are more satisfying. There are only two reasons why we are not as successful as we would like to be in laying up earthly treasures. One is that we sometimes get into the wrong business and the second reason is that even though we may be in the right business, we do not always work at it effectively. Interestingly enough, these are the same reasons why we fail in laying up treasures in heaven."

"It is a serious mistake to judge God within the narrow limits of our own understanding and abilities. God has created the worlds without number and is able to hold them all in perfect control. But even the greatest worlds are not the most prized of God's creations. The welfare of his children is far more important, and he has said that the greatest of all his gifts is the eternal life that he bestows upon us. We know that death is good. Certainly we would not dare to say that any procedure or design of God was superfluous or whimsical. On the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence, scriptural and otherwise that death is an inescapable necessity in God's plan for human redemption."

"Life begins when we begin and each day we ought to be born again."

"Make sure that your ambitions are really lofty - not just seem to be. Sometimes instead of engaging in those so called mountaintop employments of great value, we spend our time in digging a pit and then falling therein, so that our temporary joy may become a permanent and bitter loss."

"Man is a thinking being what and how we think largely determines what we are and what we will become."

"One of the significant facts about the moment of birth is that it is an unconscious moment. No one ever knows when he is being born that the event is actually taking place, and sometimes we dont find out about it until quite a long time afterward. Sometimes, we never do really find out that we have been born. So frequently, we don't know why we were born we don't know where we came from we don't know what the purpose of life is nor do we understand the possibilities of our godly destiny."

"Real wealth is not so much what we have as what we are."

"Satan has no power over us except as we give it to him. God never forces us to do right, and Satan has no power to force us to do wrong."

"Successful people follow successful patterns."

"That man loves God who puts his own life in harmony with him, and who serves his fellow men as though his life depends upon it, as indeed it does."

"The greatest of all our human concepts is the immortality of the personality and the eternal glory of the human soul. Throughout eternity you will be yourself and I will be myself, with quickened senses amplified powers of perception, and vastly increased capacity for reason, understanding, love, and happiness, all of which are qualities we may develop now. Our machines wear out, our barns fall down, and our substance goes back to the dust, but our finest collection of personal qualities will have eternal life."

"The way of success is not run with seven league boots but step by step, little by little, bit by bit...with no exceptions allowed."

"Those who wallow around in the sickness of their immorality and degeneracy get very little joy out of life here and certainly not much promise is held out for them hereafter."

"We can cross the rivers of doubt and discouragement on the bridge of faith even before we get to them."

"You can’t judge a man by watching him live.... I personally watched Babe Ruth at bat three times, and he struck out every time. But at the very time that I was watching him strike out, the record said that he was the greatest home-run king who ever lived."

"We should be familiar with the great histories, the great biographies. We should be familiar with the great success stories, the great love stories, the great philosophies. It would also be a good idea to memorize potent passages from great poetry and other literary works. Our literature also may give us extra, pleasant hours as well as furnish contrasts and comparisons which may help us to evaluate and direct our own lives."

"You should always have 2 books...the one you're reading and the one you're writing."

"Edison was once asked how he accomplished so much. He said, 'It is deceptively simple. You and I have eighteen hours in a day in which we do something. You spend that eighteen hours doing a number of unrelated things. I spend it doing just one thing, and some of my work is bound to amount to something."

"If we were looking for some program to cure all of the problems that presently beset our world, we might well find it by properly observing the Sabbath day. The importance of the Sabbath is prefigured in the account of creation. In programming the seven creative periods, God set aside the seventh day as his Sabbath. And then in our interests he especially blessed and hallowed this one day out of each week, which he ordained to be our Sabbath day. And what a magnificent day it is when it is used as he intended."

"In order to keep our freedom, we must place out of bounds all those things that would enslave us. James says, Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. (James 4:7.) Sometimes people bring disaster upon themselves when they fail to distinguish between freedom and irresponsibility, not recognizing that the right kind of freedom has limitations on it. For example, freedom of the press does not give anyone the license to commit libel against his neighbor. Freedom of the seas does not give anyone a pirate's license to take the treasures of others, nor does it entitle anyone to sink ships or destroy lives. A very important part of liberty consists in understanding where freedom ends and license beings. . . Actually, no one is ever given any right to do wrong."

"Many people try to make their peace co-exist with their sins; however, it is pretty difficult to get peace by compact or negotiation or because of some dictated decree without having peace in ourselves. When some of the more influential European nations objected to Hitler's program for enslaving the weaker nations of Europe, he shouted back to them angrily, Let us alone, we want peace. That is, he wanted peace while he enslaved the weaker nations without interference from anyone else. This is the kind of peace criminals want, the kind of peace that will enable them to carry out their own ungodly programs of crime unhampered by law and order."

"There is one thing more serious than merely to not believe, and that is to not care."

"We should remember that any disobedience to God or any other offenses that we pick up in our own lives are soon transmitted to others, particularly our children. That is, the power of example is the greatest power in the world. That is the way we learn to walk. That is the way we learn to talk. That is why we speak with the accent we do. That is how we learn to dress ourselves. That is why we have our hair cut and our clothing tailored the way we do."

"When one has definitely eliminated those things that he will not do, then he can concentrate all of his time and energy on the things that he should do."

"Why do you do what you do when you know what you know?"

"You can't merely snap your fingers and get great faith in God, any more than you can snap your fingers and get great musical ability. Faith takes hold of us only when we take hold of it. The great psychologist, William James, said, 'That which holds our attention determines our action,' and one of the unfortunate things in life is that we sometimes focus our attention on the wrong things."