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 James

Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly.

Behavior | Determination | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Rule | Will |

William James

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

Change |

William James

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

Change | People | Time |

William James

Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

Behavior | Conduct | Organization |

William James

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

Change | Enough | Future | Past | Reality | Will |

William James

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

Change | Evil | Fear | Good | Men |

William James

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

Change | Education | Mind | Need | Science | Sin | Struggle |

William Law

There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.

Behavior | Death | Nature | Nothing | Perfection | Safe |

William Law

When religion is in the hands of the mere natural man, he is always the worse for it; it adds a bad heat to his own dark fire and helps to inflame his four elements of selfishness, envy, pride, and wrath. And hence it is that worse passions, or a worse degree of them are to be found in persons of great religious zeal than in others that made no pretenses to it. History also furnishes us with instances of persons of great piety and devotion who have fallen into great delusions and deceived both themselves and others. The occasion of their fall was this: ... They considered their whole nature as the subject of religion and divine graces; and therefore their religion was according to the workings of their whole nature, and the old man was as busy and as much delighted in it as the new.

Change | Knowledge | Right |

William James

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

Change | Discovery | Revolution | Discovery |

William James

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.

Belief | Change | Fear | Past | Sense | System | World |

William Law

God is always present and always working towards the life of the soul and its deliverance from captivity under flesh and blood. But this inward work of God, though never ceasing or altering, is yet always and only hindered by the activity of our own nature and faculties, by bad men through their obedience to earthly passions and by good men through their striving to be good in their own way, by their natural strength and a multiplicity of holy labors and contrivances. Both these sorts of people obstruct the work of God upon their souls. For we can cooperate with God no other way than by submitting to the work of God, and seeking, and leaving ourselves to it.

Change | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Prayer | Skill |

William James

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.

Belief | Change | Fear | Past | Sense | World |

William James

The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one has been through the experience one's self.

Belief | Change | Passion | Peace | Salvation | Sense | Will | Loss |

William Law

There is nothing noble in a clergyman but burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poor in his profession but idleness and worldly spirit.

Change | God | Life | Life | Nothing | God |

William James

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.

Change |

William Morris

And the clouds fade above. Loved lips are thine as i tremble and hearken; bright thine eyes shine, though the leaves thy brow darken. O love, kiss me into silence, lest no word avail me, stay my head with thy bosom lest breath and life fail me! O sweet day, o rich day, made long for our love!

Change | Doubt | Fear | Past | Smile | Wonder |

William Morris

Cricket, following the Ashes success, has proven to be one of the major drivers of inbound tourism in the sports and leisure sector.

Change | Fear | Life | Life | Love | Pain |

William Morris

Forget days past, heart-broken, put all memory by No grief on the green hillside, no pity in the sky, Joy that may not be spoken fills mead and flower and tree.

Body | Change |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

High fortune makes both our virtues and vices stand out as objects that are brought clearly to view by the light.

Change | Habit | People | Old |