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

Victor Hugo

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Character | Courage | God | Life | Life | Patience | Peace | Wisdom | God |

Kuzari or The Kitab al Khazari written by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi NULL

One’s pleasure is enhanced by the duty of saying blessings over everything he enjoys or that happens to him.

Blessings | Character | Duty | Pleasure |

James Russell Lowell

Endurance is the crowning quality, and patience all the passion of great hearts.

Character | Endurance | Passion | Patience |

John Lubbock, fully Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

The world would be both better and brighter if we would dwell on the duty of happiness, as well as on the happiness of duty.

Better | Character | Duty | World | Happiness |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Obstinacy is the strength of the weak. Firmness founded upon principle, upon the truth and right, order and law, duty and generosity, is the obstinacy of sages.

Character | Duty | Firmness | Generosity | Law | Order | Right | Strength | Truth |

J. Russell Lynes

Great things often come from where despair reigns. The performance of duty still determines man's destiny.

Character | Despair | Destiny | Duty | Man |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

It is the duty of a man of honor to teach others the good which he has not been able to do himself because of the malignity of the times, that this good finally can be done by another more loved in heaven.

Character | Duty | Good | Heaven | Honor | Man | Teach |

Theodore T. Munger

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to struggle toward it.

Attainment | Character | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Love | Patience | Struggle | Sympathy | Wisdom | Wise |

Madame de Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our duty and find in it our pleasures.

Character | Duty | Happy | Love |

Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.

Behavior | Character | Man | Moderation | Patience | Wise |

Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay

Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.

Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |

Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.

Character | Heart | Injustice | Injustice | Integrity | Patience | Purpose | Purpose |

Thomas Morton

There is a point when patience ceases to be a virtue.

Character | Patience | Virtue | Virtue |

Thomas Paine

The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from on to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points - his duty to God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.

Character | Duty | God | Man | Respect | Respect |

Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart of life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

Character | Duty | Eternal | Good | Grace | Heart | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Right | Soul | Truth |

William Swan Plumer

Be patient in little things. Learn to bear the every-day trials and annoyances of life quietly and calmly, and then, when unforeseen trouble or calamity comes, your strength will not forsake you. There is much difference between genuine patience and sullen endurance, as between the smile of love, and the malicious gnashing of the teeth.

Calamity | Character | Day | Endurance | Life | Life | Little | Love | Patience | Smile | Strength | Trials | Will | Calamity | Trouble | Learn |