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

Henry Giles

How mysterious in this human life, with all its diversities of contrast and compensation; this web of checkered destinies,; this sphere of manifold allotment, where man lives in his greatness and grossness, a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the brutes.

Angels | Character | Compensation | Contrast | Greatness | Life | Life | Little | Man |

John Cunningham Geikie

Our character is but the stamp on our souls of the free choices of good and evil we have made through life.

Character | Evil | Good | Life | Life |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Character | Solitude | World |

David Hummell Greer

The character of a people, like the character of a person, should not be measured by its worst, but rather by its best; and reckoned by that rule and by that standard.

Character | People | Rule |

W. T. Grant, fully William Thomas Grant

It must be obvious to those who take the time to look at human life that its greatest values lie not in getting things, but in doing them, in doing them together, in all working toward a common aim, in the experience of comradeship, of warmhearted 100% human life.

Character | Experience | Life | Life | Time |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.

Character | Faith | Power | Will |

John P. Grier

The function of values is to give us the illusion of purpose in life.

Character | Illusion | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose |

Edwin Paxton Hood

Be as careful of the books you read as the company you keep. Your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

Books | Character | Will |

Harry Graham, Fully Jocelyn Henry Clive 'Harry' Graham

Though the noblest disposition you inherit, And your character with piety is pack'd, All such qualities have very little merit unaccompanied by Tact.

Character | Little | Merit | Piety | Qualities | Tact |

Newell Dwight Hillis

Our world is a college, events are teachers, happiness is the graduating point, character is the diploma God gives man.

Character | Events | God | Man | World | God | Happiness |

Heinrich Heine

Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature’s grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.

Character | Contemplation | Greatness | Man | Nature | Contemplation |

Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover

The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men. And character comes from boyhood. Thus every boy is a challenge to his elders.

Challenge | Character | Glory | Men |

James M. Hoppin

A nation's greatness resides not in her material resources, but in her will, faith, intelligence, and moral forces.

Character | Faith | Greatness | Intelligence | Will |

Greenough NULL

Activity is the presence of function - character is the record of function.

Character |

Joel Hawes

A good character is, in all cases, the fruit of personal exertion. It is not inherited from parents, it is not created by external advantages, it is no necessary appendage of birth, wealth, talents or station; but it is the result of one’s own endeavors.

Birth | Character | Good | Parents | Wealth |

Joel Hawes

A good name lost is seldom regained. When character is gone, all is gone, and one of the richest jewels of life is lost forever.

Character | Good | Life | Life |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The idolatrous worship of ethical values in and for themselves defeats its own object - and defeats it not only because... there is a lack of all-around development, but also and above all because even the highest forms of moral idolatry are God-eclipsing and therefore guarantee the idolater against the enlightening and liberating knowledge of Reality.

Character | God | Guarantee | Knowledge | Object | Reality | Worship |

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 |