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

Jeremy Taylor

Curiosity is the direct incontinency of the spirit. Know therefore at the door before you enter upon your neighbor’s privacy; and remember that there is no difference between entering into his house and looking into it.

Curiosity | Spirit | Wisdom |

George Washington Truett

There is a vast difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession; liberty is a right; toleration is a matter of expediency; liberty is a matter of principle; toleration is a grant of man; liberty is a gift of God.

God | Liberty | Man | Right | Toleration | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.

Nothing | System | Wisdom |

Joe D. Batten and Leonard C. Hudson

The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person is the difference between get and give. The unhappy person is concerned with: the world is against me, what’s in it for me, what are people doing to me, and so forth. When your central theme in life is getting you usually do get headaches. But the happy person is looking toward what he can do, what he can give, what he can accomplish.

Happy | Life | Life | People | World |

William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall

The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.

Important | Intelligence | Life | Life | Man | Sense |

Phillips Brooks

There is an absolute truth about everything; it lies behind all blunders and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, unfound certainty, like the great sea beneath its waves, like the great sky behind its clouds. God knows it. It and the possession of it makes the eternal difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound, unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely existent behind and at the heart of everything.

Absolute | Eternal | Faith | God | Heart | Knowledge | Man | Truth | God |

Luis Buñuel, fully Luis Buñuel Portolés

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. Their effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important.

Change | Important | Responsibility | Society | World |

Lydian Emerson, also Lidian Emerson, born Lydia Jackson

The only sin which people never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Opinion | People | Sin | Forgive |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

Is there really as much difference as we think between the Aztec human sacrifices to their gods and the modern human sacrifices in war to the idols of nationalism and the sovereign state?

War | Think |

Emmet Fox

There is a big difference between what you really believe, and what you think you ought to believe, or what you want to believe. You demonstrate what you really believe.

Think |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

Problems | World |

Merrick Furst

The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time.

Space | Time |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

This is the difference between religion and philosophy. Religion begins with the sense of the ineffable; philosophy ends with the sense of the ineffable. Religion begins where philosophy ends.

Ends | Philosophy | Religion | Sense |

Joseph Jaworski

I discovered that people are not really afraid of dying; they’re afraid of not ever having lived, not every having deeply considered their life’s higher purpose, and not ever having stepped into that purpose and at least tried to make a difference in this world.

Life | Life | People | Purpose | Purpose | World | Afraid |

Thomas Jefferson

Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

Opinion |