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

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

Some good must come by clinging to the right. Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

Fate | Good | Mind | Service | Study | Unfaithfulness | Fate | Friendship | Think |

Victor Hugo

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

Force | Service | Obstacle |

Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

If a householder molds himself according to the circumstances just like nature molds Herself according to seasons and performs his Karma then only shall he acquire happiness. One who does this successfully gains in all walks of life.

Charity | Service |

Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

Only by indulging in good deeds can one expect good results.

God | Good | Service | God |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The Divine is a wine that would intoxicate you. The nectar that the Name of the Lord is saturated in produces it. Taste it and you forget everything else; you are transformed.

Doubt | Service |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The upper part of the womb do I place below, there shall come to thee neither offspring nor birth. I render thee sterile and devoid of offspring; a stone do I make into a cover for thee.

God | Service | Society | Universe | Society | God |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Control | Little | Service | Speech | Time | Afraid |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

Men crowd into honorable careers without other vocation than their vanity, or at best their love of fame.

Service |

Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

The accumulation of good work is joyful.

Compassion | Life | Life | Service | Truth |

Tryon Edwards

The mortality of mankind is but a part of the process of living - a step on the way to immortality. - Dying, to the good man, is but a brief sleep, from which he wakes to a perfection and fullness of life in eternity.

Change | God | Life | Life | Service | Surrender | Work | God |

Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.

Compassion | Life | Life | Service | Truth |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

No one has expressed what is needed better than Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel. One of the best-known and most respected Arab journalists working today, he wrote the following, in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim extremist groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq: Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture... The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry... We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.

Better | Good | Service |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so long as I am able. . . . No course of my choosing or of their (nations at war) will lead to war. War can come only by the willful acts and aggressions of others.

Man | Service |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken

Business | Disparagement | Error | Experience | History | Hope | Influence | Justice | Love | Mankind | Nations | People | Service | Will | World | Business |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

Learning | Public | Service | Spirit | Will |

Thucydides NULL

They have discovered that the length of time we have now been in commission has rotted our ships and wasted our crews, and that with the completeness of our crews and the soundness of the pristine efficiency of our navy has departed. For it is impossible for us to haul our ships ashore and dry them out because the enemy's vessels being as many or more than our own, we are constantly anticipating an attack.

Change | Future | Past | Present | Right | Service | Virtue | Virtue | Wealth |

William Shakespeare

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; as hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are 'clept all by the name of dogs: the valued file distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, the housekeeper, the hunter, every one according to the gift which bounteous nature hath in him closed. Macbeth, Act iii, Scene 1

Love | Service |

Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

The average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name.

Books | People | Service | Smile | Will |

William James

Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker.

Capacity | Frailties | Instinct | Mystery | Reality | Risk | Service | World |

William James

For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Life | Life | Morality | Patriotism | Service |