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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Truth needs not the service of passion; yea, nothing so dis-serves it, as passion when set to serve it. The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Meekness.

Meekness | Nothing | Passion | Service | Spirit | Truth |

Anthony J. D'Angelo

Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.

Ignorance | Passion | Persistence |

W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon

The astonishing thing about the human being is not so much his intellect and bodily structure, profoundly mysterious as they are. The astonishing and least comprehensible thing about him is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely passion for ideas and ideals.

Ideals | Ideas | Passion | Vision | Intellect |

William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

Hope | Nothing | Passion |

Anthony J. D'Angelo

Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.

Learning | Passion | Will |

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Truth needs not the service of passion; yea, nothing so deserves it, as passion when set to serve it. The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Meekness.

Meekness | Nothing | Passion | Service | Spirit | Truth |

Sidney Greenberg

Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality.

Appreciation | Awareness | Death | Life | Life | Mourn | Passion | Reflection | Thankfulness | Will | Appreciation | Awareness |

B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell

No clear thinking is possible in a passion – any more than it is possible to see clearly through glasses that are covered with steam.

Passion | Thinking |

Os Guiness

Our passion is to know we’re fulfilling the purpose for which we’re here on earth. We all desire to make a difference. We long to leave a legacy. We yearn, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “to leave the world a bit better.”

Better | Desire | Earth | Passion | Purpose | Purpose | World |

Francesco Guicciardini

Ambition is not a reprehdnsible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined towards laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole end power.

Ambition | Glory | Laziness | Means | Men | Passion | Power | Ambition |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

It is our first duty to serve society, and, after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged.

Devotion | Duty | Passion | Salvation | Society |

Jonathan Mayhew

No passion or affection, with which we are born, can be in itself sinful; it becomes so, only by willful or careless indulgence.

Indulgence | Passion |

Jean Baptiste Massillon

The world? It is a territory under a curse, where even its pleasures carry with them their thorns and their bitterness… A place where hope, regarded as a passion so sweet, renders everybody unhappy; where those who have nothing to hope for, think themselves still more miserable, where all that pleases, pleases never for long; and where ennui is always most the sweetest destiny and the most supportable that one can expect in it.

Bitterness | Destiny | Ennui | Hope | Nothing | Passion | World | Think |

Alexander Maclaren

The peace of God is peace within ourselves. The unrest of human life comes largely from our being torn asunder by contending impulses. Conscience pulls this way, passion that. Desire says, “Do this”; reason, judgment, prudence say “It is your peril if you do!” One desire fights against another. And so the man is rent asunder. There must be the harmonizing of all the being if there is to be real rest of spirit.

Conscience | Desire | God | Judgment | Life | Life | Man | Passion | Peace | Peril | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Rest | Spirit | God |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

No one has the right to despise the rich until, like Our Lord, he has proven himself free from the passion to possess… and then he will not wish to despise any one.

Despise | Lord | Passion | Right | Will |

Gerald Vann

Temperance is not the absence of passion, but is the transfiguring of passion into wholeness. Without it... you will have the senses usurping sovereignty and excluding the spirit; you will have them deciding good and evil and excluding God.

Absence | Evil | God | Good | Passion | Spirit | Wholeness | Will |