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

Walter Savage Landor

It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires.

Belief | Character | Wise |

Walter Lippmann

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

Belief | Character | Error | Justify | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Order | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

With most people, doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.

Belief | Character | Doubt | People |

George S. Merriam

That belief which inspires a man to higher life, which moves him to trample down his besetting sins, to help his weaker brother, to rise into communion with God, is to him a Divine voice.

Belief | Character | God | Life | Life | Man |

Avigdor Miller

If a person learns to be grateful to the Creator because he is allowed to awake in the morning, then every day is begun with a feeling of gratitude for an additional day of life.

Character | Day | Gratitude | Life | Life |

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Time presupposes a view of time. It is, therefore, not like a river, not a flowing substance. The fact that the metaphor based on this comparison has persisted from the time of Heraclitus to our own day is explained by our surreptitiously putting into the river a witness of its course.

Character | Day | Time | Wisdom | Witness |

John Homer Miller

In a life well lived, each succeeding day becomes better than the last. Each day, each year, each experience does not stand alone; it cannot be separated from what has happened before or what may happen after. Yesterday determines today, and today helps determine tomorrow.

Better | Character | Day | Experience | Life | Life | Tomorrow |

Posidonius, aka Posidonius of Rhodes or Posidonius of Apameia (meaning "of Poseidon") NULL

A single day in the life of a learned man is worth more than the lifetime of a fool.

Character | Day | Life | Life | Man | Worth |

Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL

The highest of characters, in my estimation, is his who is as ready to pardon the moral errors of mankind as if he were every day guilty of some himself; and at the same time as cautious of committing a fault as if he never forgave one.

Character | Day | Estimation | Fault | Mankind | Pardon | Time | Fault | Guilty |

Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Belief | Character | Chastity | Lying | Man | Infidelity | Happiness |

William Lyon Phelps

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.

Belief | Character | Fallacy | Life | Life | Time | Youth | Youth |

Sinéad O’Connor, fully Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor

The purpose of life is to find the truth and make it come into everything you do, from one end of the day to the other.

Character | Day | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Truth |

Tatjana Patitz

I believe that being true to the self is the most important thing in life - to have a free heart, a pure soul and a pure mind. We all live, or should live, for the fulfillment of the self. We are all mirror images of each other; whatever we feel in ourselves we feel in others. I believe that we create our own lives... Intuition should play the main role in everything we do. Through the creative source of the mind and the unlimited power of the spirit all our deepest wishes come true. For me the meaning is that we are all one, and the only true reality is the spirit. Believing in the power of spirit is simply to have a passion for life, to learn, to grow, to evolve and most of all to love, and live each day and each moment of the day to the fullest.

Character | Day | Fulfillment | Heart | Important | Intuition | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Passion | Play | Power | Reality | Self | Soul | Spirit | Wishes |

William Lyon Phelps

One of the chief reasons for success in life is the ability to maintain a daily interest in one's work, to have a chronic enthusiasm, to regard each day as important.

Ability | Character | Day | Enthusiasm | Important | Life | Life | Regard | Success | Work |

Publius Syrus

Every day should be passed as if it were to be our last.

Character | Day |

Publius Syrus

You can never tell what to wish for or what to avoid: so each day mocks you.

Character | Day |