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

Benjamin Franklin

Let honesty and industry be thy constant companions, and spend one penny less than thy clear gains; then shall thy pocket begin to thrive; creditors will not insult, nor want oppress, nor hunger bite, nor nakedness freeze thee.

Character | Honesty | Hunger | Industry | Insult | Will |

Friedrich Gentz, aka Friedrich von Gentz

Two principles govern the moral and intellectual world. One is perpetual progress, the other the necessary limitations to that progress. If the former alone prevailed, there would be nothing steadfast and durable on earth, and the whole of social life would be the sport of winds and waves. If the alter had exclusive sway, or even if it obtained a mischievous preponderancy, every thing would petrify or rot. The best ages of the world are those in which these two principles are the most equally balanced. In such ages every enlightened man ought to adopt both principles, and with one hand develop what he can, with the other restrain and uphold what he ought.

Character | Earth | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Principles | Progress | World | Govern |

Edgar Z. Friedenberg

What is learned in high school, or for that matter, anywhere at all, depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually experiences in the place.

Character |

Henry Ford

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.

Character | Life | Life | World | Learn |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who serves the public is a poor animal; he worries himself to death and no one thanks him for it.

Character | Death | Public | Wisdom |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The only thing that brings a mother undiluted satisfaction is her relation to a son; it is quite the most complete relationship between human beings, and the one that is the most free from ambivalence. The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition which she has had to surpress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not firmly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and in acting the part of a mother towards him.

Ambition | Character | Hope | Husband | Marriage | Mother | Relationship | Woman | Ambition | Child |

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

A man has only one way of being immortal on this earth: he has to forget he is mortal.

Character | Earth | Man | Mortal |

Henry Ford

There are two ways of making money - one at the expense of others, the other by service to others. The first method does not “make” money, does not create anything; it only “gets” money - and does not always succeed at that.

Character | Method | Money | Service |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One can be instructed in society; one is inspired only in solitude.

Character | Society | Solitude |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world - making the most of one's best.

Character | Daring | Pity | Rebellion | Self | World |

Benjamin Franklin

Doing an Injury puts you below your Enemy; Revenging one makes you even with him; Forgiving it sets you above him.

Character | Enemy |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

What we give out as scientific truth is only the product of our own needs and desires, as they are formulated under varying external conditions; that is to say, it is illusion once more. Ultimately we find only what we need to find, and see only what we desire to see. We can do nothing else. And since the criterion of truth, correspondence with an external world, disappears, it is absolutely immaterial what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a right to accuse any one else of error.

Character | Desire | Error | Illusion | Need | Nothing | Right | Truth | World |

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

[Suicide note] - Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Character | Death | Grief | Heart | Life | Life | Misfortune | Pain | Power | Rights | Service | Suicide | Usefulness |

Lowell Fillmore

The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he."

Body | Character | Man | Power | Thinking | Thought |

Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

Character | Life | Life | Melancholy |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.

Associates | Character | Mediocrity | Rest | Wonder |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Each one sees what he carries in his heart.

Character | Heart |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

What can be the aim of withholding from children, or let us say from young people, this information about the sexual life of human beings? Is it a fear of arousing interest in such matters prematurely, before it spontaneously stirs in them? Is it a hope of retarding by concealment of this kind the development of the sexual instinct in general, until such time as it can find its way into the only channels open to it in the civilized social order? Is it supposed that children would show no interest or understanding for the facts and riddles of sexual life if they were not prompted to do so by outside influence? Is it regarded as possible that the knowledge withheld from them will not reach them in other ways? Or is it genuinely and seriously intended that later on they should consider everything connected with sex as something despicable and abhorrent from which their parents and teachers wish to keep them apart as long as possible? I am really at a loss so say which of these can be the motive for the customary concealment from children of everything connected with sex. I only know that these arguments are one and all equally foolish, and that I find it difficult to pay them the compliment of serious refutation.

Character | Children | Concealment | Fear | Hope | Influence | Instinct | Knowledge | Life | Life | Order | Parents | People | Time | Understanding | Will | Loss |