Great Throughts Treasury

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

Related Quotes

Alexander Ziskind Maimon

When a person who has some personal suffering sees others empathize with him, he feels a degree of relief.

Character | Suffering |

John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.

Experience | Life | Life | Man | Suffering | Will | Wisdom | Learn |

Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani

What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well.

Apathy | Character | Children | Discipline | Duty | God | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Service | Silence | Suffering | Words | God |

Simone Weil

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Character | Life | Life | Order | People | Suffering |

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.

Events | Life | Life | Punishment | Suffering | Truth | Wisdom | Work | Learn |

R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth

We are to live with life and die with death, not separated from them. The problem of suffering is insoluble, because we think of ourselves as apart from pain and death, in opposition to them. We can be free from change only by changing with it.

Change | Death | Life | Life | Opposition | Pain | Suffering | Wisdom | Think |

Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

Of all suffering from fortune, the unhappiest misfortune is to have known a happy fortune.

Fortune | Happy | Misfortune | Suffering | Wisdom | Misfortune |

Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one is miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and commend it in their precepts.

Adversity | Happy | Prosperity | Wisdom |

Celia Burleigh

When God will educate a man, He compels him to learn bitter lessons. He sends him to school to the Necessities rather than to the Graces, that by knowing all suffering he may know also the eternal consolations.

Eternal | God | Knowing | Man | Suffering | Will | Wisdom | God | Learn |

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The meaning of life cannot be separated from the meaning of death. Even the sun dies, so death is natural too. Only suffering must be appeased.

Death | Life | Life | Meaning | Suffering | Wisdom |

Joanne Catherall

The three foundations of learning: Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much.

Learning | Suffering | Wisdom |

James Burgh

In prosperity prepare for a change; in adversity hope for one.

Adversity | Change | Hope | Prosperity | Wisdom |

John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel

By adversity are wrought the greatest works of admiration, and all the fair examples of renown, out of distress and misery are grown.

Admiration | Adversity | Distress | Wisdom |