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

Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

Sickness and disease are in weak minds the sources of melancholy; but that which is painful to the body, may be profitable to the soul. Sickness puts us in mind of our mortality, and, while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a proper sense of duty.

Body | Disease | Duty | Melancholy | Mind | Sense | Soul | Wisdom |

George Barrell Cheever

For health and the constant enjoyment of life, give me a keen and ever present sense of humor; it is the next best thing to an abiding faith in providence.

Enjoyment | Faith | Health | Humor | Life | Life | Present | Providence | Sense | Wisdom |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste genius is only sublime folly.

Folly | Genius | Good | Sense | Taste | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Dignity | Duty | Sense | Wisdom | Wonder | World |

Charles H. Burr

Getters generally don't get happiness; givers get it. You simply give to others a bit of yourself - a thoughtful act, a helpful idea, a word of appreciation., a lift over a rough spot, a sense of understanding, a timely suggestion. You take something out of your mind, garnished in kindness out of your heart, and put it into the other fellow's mind and heart.

Appreciation | Heart | Kindness | Mind | Sense | Understanding | Wisdom |

Samuel Butler

Our latest moment is always our supreme moment. Five minutes delay in dinner now is more important that a great sorrow ten years gone.

Delay | Important | Sorrow | Wisdom |

James Burgh

No state can be more destitute than that of a person, who, when the delights of sense forsake him, has no pleasures of the mind.

Mind | Sense | Wisdom |

John Dewey

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive.

Contradiction | Future | Necessity | Nothing | Past | Present | Sense | Wisdom |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

The artist (in literature) appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain.

Beauty | Capacity | Literature | Mystery | Pain | Pity | Sense | Wisdom | Wonder |

Bernard d'Espagnat

The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and the facts established by experiment.

Consciousness | Doctrine | Existence | Experiment | Wisdom | World |

John Dewey

I believe that... education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living... all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race... Every thinker puts one portion of an apparently stable world in peril.

Consciousness | Education | Future | Individual | Peril | Race | Wisdom | World |

Henri Deterding, fully Henri Wilhelm August Deterding

There is a master key to success with which no man can fail. Its name is simplicity. Simplicity, I mean, in the sense of reducing to the simplest possible terms every problem that besets us. Whenever I have met a business proposition which, after taking thought, I could not reduce to simplicity, I have left it alone.

Business | Man | Sense | Simplicity | Success | Thought | Wisdom | Business |

John Dewey

"Faith is tendency toward action." According to such a view, faith is the matrix of formulated creeds and the inspiration of endeavor... Faith in its newer sense signifies that experience itself is the sole ultimate authority.

Action | Authority | Experience | Faith | Inspiration | Sense | Wisdom |

Charles W. Eliot

Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarded who sees within the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to overcome.

Evil | Hope | Life | Life | Right | Wisdom | Wrong |

Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder, and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.

Art | Awe | Beauty | Experience | Good | Knowledge | Men | Science | Sense | Wisdom | Wonder | Art | Beauty |