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

Christian Nestell Bovee

Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.

Character | Consciousness | Self | Sensibility |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The man who has lived the longest is not he who has spent the greatest number of years, but he who has had the greatest sensibility of life.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Sensibility |

Archibald Alison

The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of construction. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.

Art | Beauty | Criticism | Nature | Regard | Sensibility | Time | Wisdom | Work | Beauty |

George Barrell Cheever

The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven.

Angels | Glory | God | Habit | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Power | Sensibility | Soul | Wisdom | World | God | Happiness |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.

Atheism | Beauty | Fidelity | Hope | Men | Mother | People | Religion | Sensibility | Wisdom | Woman | Beauty |

François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

It is this unquiet self-love that renders us so sensitive. The sick man, who sleeps ill, thinks the night long. We exaggerate, from cowardice, all the evils which we encounter; they are great, but our sensibility increases them. The true way to bear them is to yield ourselves up with confidence to God.

Confidence | Cowardice | God | Love | Man | Self | Self-love | Sensibility | Wisdom |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of men's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist... faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.

Arrogance | Art | Diversity | Experience | Individual | Judgment | Man | Men | Mind | Poetry | Power | Reality | Sensibility | Society | Vision | Wisdom | Society | Art | Truths |

Talleyrand, fully Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 1st Prince de Bénévent NULL

Too much sensibility creates unhappiness; too much insensibility leads to crime.

Crime | Sensibility | Unhappiness | Wisdom |

Amos Bronson Alcott

Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity, and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without his ornament.

Heart | Manners | Modesty | Respect | Reverence | Self | Sensibility | Sentiment |

Blaise Pascal

The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things indicates a strange inversion.

Man | Sensibility | Trifles |

Blaise Pascal

The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, are the marks of a strange inversion.

Man | Sensibility | Trifles |

Edmund Burke

Never expect to find perfection in men, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good, on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter.

Age | Behavior | Commerce | Daring | Duty | Evil | Fame | Good | Little | Men | Perfection | Public | Reputation | Sensibility | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Commerce |

Immanuel Kant

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.

Knowledge | Nothing | Object | Sensibility | Thought | Understanding | Think |

Lewis Mumford

When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose in sensibility and significance.

Death | Men | Peace | Sensibility |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Books | Heart | Mind | Passion | Sensibility | Thought | Thought |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Books | Good | Heart | Mind | Passion | Sensibility | Thought | Thought |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Books | Heart | Mind | Passion | Sensibility | Thought | Thought |

Thomas Moore

If we could loosen our grip on the functionality of life and let ourselves be arrested by the imaginal richness that surrounds all objects, natural and human-made, we might ground our secular attitudes in a religious sensibility and give ordinary life soul.

Life | Life | Sensibility | Soul |