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

Walter Lippmann

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

Comfort | Nothing | Soul | Think |

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words are rather to be assimilated to things, "out there". Such "things" are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead.

Man | Thought | Understanding | Think | Thought | Value |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

World |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

As if in a school for gods, we learn the consequences of thought.

Conquest | Ego | Energy | Giving | Important | Impulse | Mystery | Self | Will |

W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith

The belief, the try, a camera and some film - the fragile weapons of my good intentions. With these I fought war.

Compassion | Enough | Important | Rest | Right | Sense | Understanding |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's control not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a teleplastic mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. (The Vane Sisters)

Little |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.

Association | Beauty | Joy | Men | Nature | Solitude | Youth | Association | Youth | Beauty |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.

Darkness | Feelings | God | Listening | People | Power | Rest | Wavering | World | God |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts.

Constraint | Looks | Men | Need | Rage | Sense | Woman | Work | Old |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontes and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow, some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs. Gaskell and one would have done.

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

Enhancement of individual growth and success shall unequivocally lead to national prosperity.

Day | Ego |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

If your wish is fulfilled, you revere Me; if it is not, you revile Me. That is how Desire debases you.

Happy | Listening | Strength | Will | Wishes |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

Your eyes should not seek evil sights; your ears should not seek evil tales; your tongue should not seek evil speech; your hands should not seek evil acts; your minds should not seek evil thoughts.

Control | Devotion | God | God |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

We should make efforts to acquire right knowledge and refrain from violence.

Diet | Opportunity | Regard | Ugly |

Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL

The sun that illuminates the pot both within and without is not destroyed with the destruction of the pot; so the Sakshi (witness) that illuminates the body is not destroyed with the destruction of the body. – Atmabodha Upanishad

Change | Lord | Self | World |

Turkish Proverbs

A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.

Kill |

William Shakespeare

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth; but either it was different in blood . . . Or else misgraffed in respect of years . . . Or else it stood upon the choice of friends. . . Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, war, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, making it momentany as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream brief as the lightning in the collied night, that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' the jaws of darkness do devour it up: so quick bright things come to confusion. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene 1

William Shakespeare

But this same day must end that work the ides of March begun; and whether we shall meet again I know not. Therefore our everlasting farewell take: forever, and forever, farewell, Cassius! If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; if not, why, then, this parting was well made. Julius Caesar, Act v, Scene 1

Magic | Sound | Work |

William Godwin

Liberty is one of the best of all sublunary advantages. I would willingly therefore communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little possible violence to, the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed.

Accident | Consideration | Contradiction | Control | Experiment | Father | Indulgence | Little | Man | Means | Mind | Nothing | Passion | Persuasion | Power | Trust | Will | Happiness |