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

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

To know and to serve God, of course, is why we’re here, a clear truth that like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard... Even in time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. If we had no other purpose in life, it would be good enough to simply take care of them and goose them once in a while.

Care | Character | Enough | Focus | God | Good | Greed | Life | Life | People | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Truth |

Walter Savage Landor

Lies are as communicative as fleas; and truth is as difficult to lay hold upon as air.

Character | Truth |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Subjectivity is the truth. By virtue of the relationship subsisting between the eternal truth and the existing individual, the paradox came into being. Let us now go further, let us suppose that the eternal essential truth is itself a paradox. How does the paradox come into being? By putting the eternal essential truth into juxtaposition with existence. Hence when we posit such a conjunction with the truth itself, the truth becomes a paradox. The eternal truth has come into being in time: this is the paradox.

Character | Eternal | Existence | Individual | Paradox | Relationship | Time | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The truth of not-knowing is the only factor from which one can move. The truth of that is stable. A mind that does not know is in a state of learning. The moment I say I have learned, I have stopped learning and that stopping is the stability of division.

Character | Knowing | Learning | Mind | Truth |

Ivan Kozlof, fully Ivan Ivanovich Kozlov

Money is a bottomless sea, in which honor, conscience, and truth may be drowned.

Character | Conscience | Honor | Money | Truth |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.

Character | Individual | Truth | Uncertainty |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as to a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

Action | Character | God | Mind | Truth | Understanding | Wishes | God | Understand |

Sinclair Lewis, fully Harry Sinclair Lewis

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

Character | Error | Life | Life | Need | Religion | Worth |

John Locke

Nothing being so beautiful to the eye as truth is to the mind; nothing so deformed and irreconcilable to the understanding as a lie.

Character | Mind | Nothing | Truth | Understanding |

Christoph Ernst Luthardt

Truth is by its very nature intolerant, exclusive, for every truth is the denial of its opposing error.

Character | Error | Nature | Truth |

James Russell Lowell

The only conclusive evidence of a man’s sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

Character | Evidence | Life | Life | Man | Money | Practice | Sincerity | Truth | Words |

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

It is not the truth which a man possesses, or believes he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forth to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man. For it is not by the possession, by the search after truth that he enlarges his power, wherein alone consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes one content, indolent, proud.

Character | Effort | Man | Perfection | Power | Search | Truth | Worth |

Israel Salanter Lipkin

Sincerity makes an untruth seem like a truth, while insincerity makes a truth seem like an untruth.

Character | Insincerity | Sincerity | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative in to an absolute.

Absolute | Character | People | Truth |

Gaius Cassius Longinus

There are three ways whereby a man may become great: being loyal, telling the truth and not thinking idle thoughts.

Character | Man | Thinking | Truth |

Elias L. Magoon

Half a fact is a whole falsehood. He who gives the truth a false coloring by his false manner of telling it, is the worst of liars.

Character | Falsehood | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.

Change | Character | Truth | Will | Truths |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Obstinacy is the strength of the weak. Firmness founded upon principle, upon the truth and right, order and law, duty and generosity, is the obstinacy of sages.

Character | Duty | Firmness | Generosity | Law | Order | Right | Strength | Truth |

Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.

Character | Enough | Truth |