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

William Law

Let a clergyman but intend to please God in all his actions, as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will know that there is nothing noble in a clergyman but a burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poorer in his profession [than] idleness and a worldly spirit.

Future | Means | Nothing | Service | World | Value |

William Law

Our hearts deceive us, because we leave them to themselves, are absent from them, taken up in outward rules and forms of living and praying. But this kind of praying, which takes all its thoughts and words only from the state of our hearts, makes it impossible for us to be strangers to ourselves. The strength of every sin, the power of every evil temper, the most secret workings of our hearts, the weakness of any or all our virtues, is with a noonday clearness forced to be seen, as soon as the heart is made our prayer book, and we pray nothing, but according to what we read, and find there.

Distinction | Glory | God | Grace | Haste | Man | Nature | Piety | Religion | Service | Spirit | Will | God | Old |

William Law

No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.

God | Life | Life | Nature | Necessity | Nothing | Religion | Service | Spirit | Will | God | Child |

William Shakespeare

O Great Corrector of enormous times, of dustie, and old tytles, that healst with blood the earth when it is sicke, and curst the world o'th pluresie of people;

Art | Good | Service | Will | Art | Old |

William Shakespeare

O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last, and careful hours with Time's deformed hand have written strange defeatures in my face. But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?

Art | Good | Service | Will | Art | Old |

William Shakespeare

Ouch! In your eyes there is a greater danger than in twenty daggers of your relatives. Look at me sweetly, and is enough to make me invulnerable to hate them.

Heaven | Love | Service | Soul | Following |

William Shakespeare

ROSENCRANTZ: I understand you not, my lord. HAMLET: I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET: The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing — GUILDENSTERN: A thing, my lord? HAMLET: Of nothing.

Service | Speech | Understand |

Elizabeth Gilbert

And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

Enough | God | Good | Love | Nothing | Reading | Service | Story | Woman | God |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

'Tis aye a solemn thing to me to look upon a babe that sleeps-- wearing in its spirit-deeps the unrevealed mystery of its Adam's taint and woe, which, when they revealed lie, will not let it slumber so.

Life | Life | Love | Sense | Service |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The tyrant should take heed to what he doth, since every victim-carrion turns to use, and drives a chariot, like a god made wroth, against each piled injustice.

Duty | Life | Life | Love | Man | Service | Sound | World |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

Family | Resolution | Service | Strength |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

I did hope tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.

Family | Life | Life | Service |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

Let this my discipline stand you in good stead of sorer strokes, never to tempt too far a Prince's patience.

Good | Service |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I can truly say that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion.

Service | Think |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

But when the days of golden dreams had perished, and even Despair was powerless to destroy; then did I learn how existence could be cherished, strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

Gold | Merit | Nothing | Service |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

Doubtless Catherine marked the difference between her friends, as one came in and the other went out. The contrast resembled what you see in exchanging a bleak, hilly, coal country for a beautiful fertile valley; and his voice and greeting were as opposite as his aspect.

Gold | Merit | Nothing | Service | Think |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

But there's this one difference: one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver. Mine has nothing valuable about it; yet I shall have the merit of making it go as far as such poor stuff can go. His had first-rate qualities, and they are lost, rendered worst than unavailing.

Gold | Service |

Emmet Fox

Affirm your divine selfhood, look the world in the face and fear nothing.

God | Means | Mistake | Opportunity | Service | Truth | Will | God |

Emmet Fox

A prayer treatment is a form of prayer based upon right thinking, namely thinking of God the Good. A vehicle through which healing is achieved… stop thinking about the problem and think only about God's perfect world.

Dynamic | God | Personality | Service | Work | World | God |

Ernest Becker

If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power­lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his sym­bolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one ac­cidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of ab­surdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?

Absolute | Character | Discussion | Dread | Faith | Feelings | Heart | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Psychology | Religion | Self | Service | Time | Value |