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

Victor Hugo

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Character | Time | World |

Yosef Y. Hurwitz

Feelings of envy are based on illusions. What actual loss do you have if someone else has more money and receives more honor than you?

Character | Envy | Feelings | Honor | Money | Loss |

Narciso Irala

Happiness is not found, it is made. One can only give the seed of happiness to another. Each one must make it grow within himself.

Character | Happiness |

Richard Huloet

Temperaunce... is a moderate gouernaunce of reason, and also one of the car [di] nall vertues.

Character | Reason |

Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey

True wisdom is to know what is best worth knowing, and to do what is best worth doing.

Character | Knowing | Wisdom | Worth |

David Hume

We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally bound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.

Character | Feelings | Force | Men | Nature | Rest | Sympathy |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Character | Self | Universe |

William Ralph Inge

As a rule, the game of life is worth playing, but the struggle is the prize.

Character | Life | Life | Rule | Struggle | Worth |

William James

We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portion of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them.

Abstract | Character | Choice | Science | Space | Will | World |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Character | Man |

Frederick Dan Huntington

There’ll be no night in Heav’n, In that blest world above; No anxious toil, no weary hours; For labor there is love. There’ll be no sorrow there, There’ll be no sorrow there, In Heav’n above, where all is love, There’ll be no sorrow there. There’ll be no grief in Heav’n, For life is one glad day, And tears are those of former things Which all have passed way. There’ll be no sin in Heav’n; Behold that blessèd throng, All holy in their spotless robes, All holy in their song.

Action | Character | Conduct | Devotion | Faith | Good | Grief | Labor | Life | Life | Love | Sin | Sorrow | Suffering | Tears | Work | World | Blessed |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of all the rest is to run into grave spiritual peril... The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness... The complete transformation of consciousness, which is “enlightenment,” “deliverance,” “salvation,” comes only when God is thought of as the perennial Philosophy affirms Him to be - immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal - and when religious practices are adapted to this conception.

Character | Conduct | Consciousness | Enlightenment | God | Grave | Little | Nothing | Peril | Philosophy | Rest | Salvation | Thought | God | Thought |

Washington Irving

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

Character | Good nature | Good | Heaven | Mind | Nature | Thought |

Robert H. Jackson, fully Robert Houghwout Jackson

A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it, and what is one man's comfort and inspiration is another's jest and scorn.

Character | Comfort | Inspiration | Man | Meaning |

Harry E. Humphreys, Jr.

True wisdom is to know what is best worth knowing, and to do what is best worth doing.

Character | Knowing | Wisdom | Worth |

William James

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering... A great many people think they are thinking when they are rearranging their prejudices... the difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of cause.

Cause | Character | Choice | Good | Important | Man | People | Thinking | Think |

William James

Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.

Absence | Character | Faith | Means | Men |

William James

Fear of life is one form or other is the great thing to exorcise; but it isn’t reason that will ever do it. Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

Character | Enough | Fear | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Reason | Suicide | Thought | Will | Thought |