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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Two kinds of people: ... those who think and those who don't; the difference comes almost entirely from education.

Education | People | Wisdom | Think |

Eduard Shevardnadze

There must be some supreme, universal design. Each of us comes to life and stays in the world for predestined period. Some leave forever, sometimes without a trace; others stay for a long time, both in life and in memory. We remain longest - we make a difference - when we manage to act not for ourselves but for others. It is possible to create good and evil. The greatest and most important thing a person can do is to understand that where good exists, evil also resides; what’s more, one must strive to stay on the side of righteousness, doing one’s best to promote good in the world. Only you can make this choice. You alone will be held responsible - by other people, by your progeny and by history.

Choice | Design | Evil | Good | History | Important | Life | Life | Memory | People | Righteousness | Time | Will | Wisdom | World | Understand |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Not being able to enlarge the one, let us contract the other; for it is from their difference that all evils arise which render us unhappy.

Imagination | Reality | Wisdom | World |

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 |