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

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

Today I will not seek the shadowy region; its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; and visions rising, legion after legion, bring the unreal world too strangely near.

Change | Eternal | Little | Love | Mind | Pleasure | Will |

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

While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame - shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.

Art | Change | Danger | Darkness | Doubt | Dreams | Grief | Guile | Hate | Heart | Hope | Liberty | Life | Life | Pain | Quiet | Reason | Suffering | Suspicion | Thankfulness | Trust | Truth | World | Danger | Art |

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

He had been content with daily labor and rough animal enjoyments, 'till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompts to higher pursuits; and, instead of guarding him from one and winning him to the other, his endeavors to raise himself had produced just the contrary result.

Change | Heaven | Kill |

Emma Goldman

Served as inspiration for Roger Baldwin, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Change | Improvement | Life | Life | Price | Revolution | Struggle | Worth | Loss |

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

I'm glad, for I shall be master of the Grange after him--and Catherine always spoke of it as her house. It isn't hers! It's mine: papa says everything she has is mine. All her nice books are mine; she offered to give me them, and pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key of her room, and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they were all, all mine.

Nature |

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

And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright unclouded day.

Change | Courage | Day | Dignity | Father | Good | Heart | Little | Mother | Will | Friends | Learn | Think |

Emma Goldman

No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.

Change | Effort | Revolution | Thought | Thought |

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

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Change | Right | World |

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

My great thought is in himself. If all else perished and he remained I should still continue to be and if all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn into a mighty stranger. I would not seem apart of it.

Change | Eternal | Little | Love | Pleasure | Thought | Time | Universe | Will | World | Thought |

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

You are a dog in the manger, Cathy, and desire no one to be loved but yourself!

Change | Eternal | Existence | Little | Love | Self | Sense | Time | Universe | Will |

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

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels — its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found; measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound — o, dreadful is the check — intense the agony when the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see; when the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, the soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain. Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; the more that anguish racks the earlier it will bless; and robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine if it but herald death, the vision is divine —

Change | Eternal | Little | Love | Mind | Pleasure | Time | Will |

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

With wide-embracing love Thy Spirit animates eternal years, pervades and broods above, changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. Though earth and moon were gone, and suns and universes ceased to be, and Thou wert left alone, every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death, nor atom that his might could render void: Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, and what Thou art may never be destroyed.

Change | Friends | Learn |

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

If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.

Change | Eternal | Little | Love | Time | Universe | Will |

Emma Goldman

Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.

Aims | Change | Dignity | Liberty | Means | Precept | Right |

Emmet Fox

Humanity is going through a difficult time, but humanity has gone through difficulties many times before in its long history, and has always come through, strengthened and purified. Do not worry yourself about the universe collapsing. It is not going to collapse, and anyway that question is none of your business. The captain is on the bridge.

Care | God | Health | Nature | Peace | Thinking | God |

Emmet Fox

When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be.

Change | Conduct | Convictions | Day | Destiny | Experience | Feelings | Life | Life | Pious | Story | Think |

Emma Goldman

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

Argument | Experience | Nature | Revolution |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

The sentence in which God comes to be involved in words is not ‘I believe in God’… It is the ‘here I am’ said to the neighbor to whom I am given over, and in which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other.

Nature | Power | Qualities | Sacred |

Emmet Fox

Minutes spent in praying for wisdom will save hours spent in overtaking your mistakes.

Change | Dread | God | Life | Life | People | Power | God |

Emmet Fox

The conscious discovery by you that you have this Power within you, and your determination to make use of it, is the birth of the child. And it is easy to see how very apt the symbol is, for the infant that is born in consciousness is just such a weak, feeble entity as any new-born child, and it calls for the same careful nursing and guarding that any infant does in its earliest days. After a time, however, as the weeks go by, the child grows stronger and bigger, until a time comes when it can well take care of itself; and then it grows and grows in wisdom and stature until, no longer leaning on the mother’s care, the child, now arrived at man’s estate, turns the tables, and repays its debt by taking over the care of its mother. So your ability to contact the mystic Power within yourself, frail and feeble at first, will gradually develop until you find yourself permitting that Power to take your whole life into its care.

Battle | Business | Cause | Change | Character | Day | Destiny | Fame | God | Grief | Hero | Life | Life | Little | Man | Mercy | Need | Obscurity | Obscurity | Problems | Qualities | Success | Trifles | Weakness | Wealth | Will | Loss | Business | God |