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

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

One learns to itch where one can scratch.

Insincerity | Purpose | Purpose | Sacred | Time |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Ability | Death | Despise | Harm | Necessity | Responsibility | Talent |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The feeling of revolt will grow stronger every day among the peoples subjected to various degrees of exploitation, and they will take up arms to gain by force the rights which reason alone has not won them.

Desire | Ideals | Purpose | Purpose | Sacrifice |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Even an economist might well ask: what is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grandchildren?

Conduct | Doubt | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

When it was all of us realist impossible dream, but in my heart do not throw.

Oppression | Peace | Power |

Erving Goffman

And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

Order | Purpose | Purpose | Will |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself.

Knowledge | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Research | Science | Space |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition.

Government | Oppression | World | Government |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own "system" and accuses every other "system" as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both.

Labor | Purpose | Purpose |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The reason for desires, goals, for finding those decisions or points of focus, is because they are the life-giving things of the Universe. Without objects of attention, or objects of desire, Life-Force does not come through any of us.

Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose |

Etel Adnan

It may be telling the truth sometimes the smartest formula for communicating erroneous information.

Purpose | Purpose |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.

Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |

Eugene Peterson

Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.

Integrity | Man | Men | Relationship | Responsibility | Title | Wisdom |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earthÂ…and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the readerÂ’s attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.

Evil | Freedom | Happy | History | People | Purpose | Purpose |

Evelyn Underhill

For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday

Eternal | God | Little | Religion | Responsibility | God |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?" That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, this magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."

Purpose | Purpose | Sadness | Thought | Thought |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

Art | History | Important | Little | Purpose | Purpose | Art |

Ezra Taft Benson

The great task of life is to learn the will of the Lord and then do it.

Belief | Experiment | Family | Freedom | Future | Genius | God | Government | Heaven | History | Inspiration | Knowledge | Land | Man | Men | Mission | Order | People | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Sense | Government | God |