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 Blake

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Character | Enough | Excess | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

Exaggerated respect for athletics, an excess of coarse impressions brought about by the technical discoveries of recent years, the increased severity of the struggle for existence due to the economic crisis, the brutalization of political life: all these factors are hostile to the ripening of the character and the desire for real culture, and stamp our age as barbarous, materialistic and superficial.

Age | Athletics | Character | Culture | Desire | Excess | Existence | Life | Life | Respect | Struggle | Respect |

Anna Jameson

I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength.

Admiration | Character | Excess | Love | Power | Strength | Suffering | Temptation | Tenderness | Terror | Weakness | Temptation |

Frederick Loomis, fully Sir Frederick Oscar Warren Loomis

Be yourself. Cultivate desirable qualities. Be alert. Look for opportunities to express yourself. Be positive. Determine your goal and the route to it. Be systematic. Take one step at a time. Be persistent. Hold to your course. Be a worker. Work your brain more than your body. Be a student. Know your job. Be fair. Treat the other man as you would be treated. Be temperate. Avoid excess in anything. Be confident. Have faith that cannot be weakened.

Body | Character | Excess | Faith | Man | Qualities | Time | Work |

Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

Character | Excess | Fortune | Mediocrity | Men | Pity | Witness | Happiness |

Monvel, pseudonymn for Jacques Marie Boutet NULL

Some virtue is needed, but not too much. Excess in anything is a defect.

Character | Excess | Virtue | Virtue |

Michael Murphy

No discipline is immune to excess or lack of wisdom. All programs for human betterment can be undermined by ignorance, imcompetence, or moral perversity.

Character | Discipline | Excess | Ignorance | Wisdom |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men.

Character | Excess | Men | Trouble |

Apocrypha NULL

In overeating nests sickness, and excess leads to loathing.

Excess | Loathing | Wisdom |

Richard Whately

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man’s devising.

Character | Excess | Man | Superstition |

William Blake

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

Excess | Joy | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Marion LeRoy Burton

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, and a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet.

Body | Diet | Excess | Gluttony | Health | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

The body oppressed by excess bears down the mind, and depresses to the earth any portion of the divine spirit we had been endowed with.

Body | Earth | Excess | Mind | Spirit | Wisdom |

William James

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

Excess | Extravagance | Man | Wisdom |