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

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Our understanding are always liable to error. Nature and certainty is very hard to come at; and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense.

Character | Error | Nature | Understanding |

Joanna Baillie

Pampered vanity is a better thing perhaps than starved pride.

Better | Character | Pride | Wisdom |

Hugh Blair

Pride makes us esteem ourselves; vanity makes us desire the esteem of others.

Character | Desire | Esteem | Pride |

Hugh Blair

Such is the infatuation of self-love, that, though in general doctrine of the vanity world all men agree, yet almost everyone flatters himself that his own case is to be an exception from the common rule.

Character | Doctrine | Love | Men | Rule | Self | Self-love | World |

William Blake

If a fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Character | Folly | Wise |

Samuel Butler

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

Arrogance | Character | Ignorance | Pride |

William Congreve

Uncertainty and expectation are the joyous of life. Security is an insipid thing, and the overtaking and possessing or a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

Character | Expectation | Folly | Life | Life | Security | Uncertainty | Wisdom | Expectation |

Jeremy Collier

Prudence is the necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess.

Character | Excess | Folly | Prudence | Prudence |

Richard Chenevix, fully Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin

The lessons of adversity are often the most benignant when they seem the most severe. The depression of vanity sometimes ennobles the feeling. The mind which does not wholly sink under misfortune rises above it more lofty than before, and is strengthened by affliction.

Adversity | Affliction | Character | Depression | Mind | Misfortune | Misfortune |

Thomas Chalmers

Guard against that vanity which courts a compliment, or is fed by it.

Character |

Henry Fielding

Affectation proceeds from one of these two causes - vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavor to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.

Affectation | Appearance | Applause | Censure | Character | Hypocrisy | Order |

J. G. Fichte, fully Johann Gottlieb Fichte

What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it. A person indolent by nature or dulled and distorted by mental servitude, learned luxury, and vanity will never raise himself to the level of idealism.

Character | Idealism | Luxury | Man | Nature | Philosophy | Servitude | Soul | System | Will |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

Chance | Character | Folly | Good | Life | Life | Nothing | Rights | Sense | Wisdom |

Anna Jameson

Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

Character | Extreme | Modesty |

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

A man's vanity tells him what is honor; a man's conscience what is justice.

Character | Conscience | Honor | Justice | Man |

Walter Savage Landor

Politeness is not always a sign of wisdom. but the want of it always leaves room for a suspicion of folly, if folly and imprudence are the same.

Character | Folly | Suspicion | Wisdom |

Anthony Kenny, fully Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny

It is characteristic of our age to endeavour to replace virtues by technology. That is to say, wherever possible we strive to use methods of physical or social engineering to achieve goals which our ancestors thought attainable only by the training of character. Thus we try so far as possible to make contraception take the place of chastity, and anesthetics to take the place of fortitude; we replace resignation by insurance policies and munificence by the Welfare state. It would be idle romanticism to deny that such techniques and institutions are often less painful and more efficient methods of achieving the goods and preventing the evils which unaided virtue once sought to achieve and avoid. But it would be an equal and opposite folly to hope that the take-over of virtue by technology may one day be complete.

Age | Character | Chastity | Day | Folly | Fortitude | Goals | Hope | Munificence | Resignation | Technology | Thought | Training | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Do you not see that this world keeps its sight all concentrated inward and its eyes open to contemplate itself? It is always vanity for you, within and without; but it is less vanity, when it is less extensive.

Character | World |