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

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.

Character | Nature |

Shalom Cohen

A brilliant mind without faith is like a beautiful face without eyes.

Character | Faith | Mind | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Character | Knowledge | Mind | Reading | Thinking |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so often the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister’s counsel and the mother’s prayer.

Character | Counsel | Life | Life | Mother | Nature | Prayer | Society | Society | Counsel |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Character | Mind | Nothing | Object |

Stuart Cloete, fully Edward Fairly Stuart Graham

Happiness is a hard thing because it is achieved only by making others happy.

Character | Happy |

George Canning

Active beneficence is a virtue of easier practice than forbearance after having conferred, or than thankfulness after having received a benefit. I know not, indeed, whether it be a greater and more difficult exercise of magnanimity for the one party to act as if he had forgotten, or for the other as if he constantly remembered the obligation.

Character | Forbearance | Magnanimity | Obligation | Practice | Thankfulness | Virtue | Virtue |

Richard Cecil

The very heart and root of sin is in an independent spirit. We erect the idol self; and not only wish others to worship, but worship ourselves.

Character | Heart | Self | Sin | Spirit | Worship |

Moncure Daniel Conway

All religion and all ethics are summed up in justice.

Character | Ethics | Justice | Religion | Wisdom |

Erika Chopich and Margaret Paul

All of our controlling behavior - our anger, blame, pouting, teaching, explaining, caretaking, compliance, and denial - comes from believing that we can control what others think of us and how they treat us, and that how they think of us and treat us defines us.

Anger | Behavior | Blame | Character | Compliance | Control | Think |

William Pitt, Lord Chatham or Lord William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, aka The Elder Pitt and The Great Commander

Good-breeding is benevolence in trifles, or the preference of others to ourselves in the daily occurrences of life.

Benevolence | Character | Good | Life | Life | Preference | Trifles |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

Art | Character | Common Sense | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Means | Rationality | Sense | Spirit | Art |

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man; it effects nothing it goes about; and hurts the man who is possessed by it more directly than any other against whom it is directed.

Anger | Character | Man | Mind | Nothing | Passion |

John Caird

The monarch of his own mind is the only real potentate.

Character | Mind |

William Ellery Channing

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

Character | Spirit |

Howard Cosell, fully Howard William Cosell, born Howard William Cohen

Courage takes many forms. there is physical courage, there is moral courage. Then there is a still higher type of courage - the courage to brave pain, to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life; to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead.

Character | Courage | Day | Enthusiasm | Joy | Life | Life | Pain |

Margaret M. Butts

Learn to laugh. And most of all, learn to laugh at yourself. The person who can give a riotous account of his own faux pas, will never have to listen to another's embarrassing account of it. He will rarely know the sting of humiliation. His a delight to be with, but more important, he is enjoying his own life, and applying to his ills and errors the most soothing balm the human spirit has devised - laughter.

Character | Important | Laughter | Life | Life | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Learn |