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

Esther Perel

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.

Sense | Wonder |

Esther Perel

Love is an exercise in selective perception.

Commitment | Marriage | Security |

Ethiopian Proverbs

If relatives help each other, what evil can hurt them?

Will |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Many people protest when we explain to them the power of telling the story of their finances as they want it to be rather than as it is, because they believe that they should be factual about what is happening. But if you continue to look at lackful what-is and speak of what-is, you will not find the improvement that you desire. If you want to effect substantial change in your life experience, you must think thoughts that feel different as you think them.

Fun | Time | Will |

Esther Perel

In order to be one, you must first be two.

Commitment | Love | Marriage | Relationship | Security | Story | Will | Writing |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Some say that you should not want money at all because the desire for money is materialistic and not spiritual. But we want you to remember that you are here in this very physical world where Spirit has materialized. You cannot separate yourself from the aspect of yourself that is spiritual, and while you are here in these bodies, you cannot separate yourselves from that which is physical or material. All the magnificent things of a physical nature that are surrounding you are Spiritual in nature.

Individual | Power | Right | World | Wrong |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Today no matter where I'm going, no matter what I'm doing, no matter who I'm doing it with, it is my dominant intent to look for and find things that feel good when I see them, when I hear them, when I smell them, when I taste them, when I touch them.

Habit | Harmony | Old |

Estonian Proverbs

Who eats a lot will do a lot.

Will |

Esther Perel

Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.

Habit |

Esther Perel

When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

Paradox | People |

Ethiopian Proverbs

Men fear danger, women only the sight of it.

Ethiopian Proverbs

One who recovers from sickness soon forgets about God.

Estonian Proverbs

Who is born stupid will die stupid.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

The whole tribe of philosophers have fallen into the fame error with Locke. Some of them, who pretend that every perception leaves an image in the mind, in the same manner almost as a seal leaves its impression behind it, are not to be excepted: for what is the image of a perception, which is not the perception itself? The mistake is owing to this, that for want of having sufficiently considered the matter, they have mistaken, for the very perception of the object, some circumstances, or some general idea, which revive themselves in its stead. To avoid such mistakes, I shall here distinguish the different perceptions we are capable of feeling, and examine them each in their proper order.

Dawn | Enough | Habit | Memory |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

We judge the objects to touch only because we have learned to judge. In fact, if we consider the size of an object, we see that it is relative to that of other objects, so we have to compare it with and judge the extent to which these differ from them, if we want to get an idea of its size, and so for ideas of substance, of shape and weight. In other words, all the ideas that come from touch presuppose the comparison and judgment.

Action | Rest |

Eudora Welty

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

Ambiguity | Words |

Eudora Welty

Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. ...I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them...

Reading |

Eugen Drewermann

All the things you did until you turned forty confront you again after midlife as a task, but this time inwardly.

Life | Life |

Eugene Peterson

A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, that one.

Bride | Good | History |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

It will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

Love | Nothing | Warning | World |