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

Carey McWilliams

Anti-Semitism is a social disease. Anti-Semitism is an excellent diagnostic device to use in studying the health and well-being of society. For it is a harbinger of war, the fear of inadequacy that, in moments of crisis, breeds havoc and social panic.

Anti-semitism | Disease | Fear | Health | Panic | Society | War | Wisdom |

Michael Murphy

[There are] four destructive effects of religious and therapeutic disciplines: 1) A practice can reinforce limiting traits, preventing their removal or transformation. 2) A practice can support limiting beliefs, giving them greater power in the life of an individual or culture. 3) A practice can subvert balanced growth by emphasizing some virtues at the expense of others. 4) A practice can limit integral development when it focuses on partial though authentic experience of superordinary reality.

Culture | Experience | Giving | Growth | Individual | Life | Life | Power | Practice | Reality | Wisdom |

Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected, if day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, our soul exists in space inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.

Body | Day | Health | Life | Life | Majority | Misfortune | Nothing | Soul | Space | System | Wisdom |

Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL

Wine takes away reason, engenders insanity, leads to thousands of crimes, and imposes such an enormous expense on nations.

Insanity | Nations | Reason | Wisdom |

Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley

The common course of things is in favor of happiness. Happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want.

Attention | Disease | Health | Order | Rule | Wisdom | Happiness |

Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard

Our tastes often improve at the expense of our happiness.

Wisdom |

William Shenstone

Health is beauty, and the most perfect health is the most perfect beauty.

Beauty | Health | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.

Ambition | Benevolence | Competition | Desire | Inequality | Jealousy | Men | Property | Rivalry | Security | Wisdom |

Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

Lost wealth may be restored by industry, the wreck of health regained by temperance, forgotten knowledge restored by study, alienated friendship smoothed into forgetfulness, even forfeited reputation won by penitence and virtue. But who ever looked upon his vanished hours, recalled his slighted years, stamped them with wisdom, or effaced from Heaven's record the fearful blot of wasted time?

Forgetfulness | Health | Heaven | Industry | Knowledge | Reputation | Study | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wealth | Wisdom | Friendship |

Norm Shealy, fully Dr. C. Norman Shealy

The greatest deficit in academic medicine is that it has generally failed to approach the problem of preventing disease or health promotion.... we are too busy taking care of people with disease to be bothered with preventing it.

Care | Disease | Health | People | Wisdom |

Robert Southey

Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things.

Body | Health | Man | Mind | Order | Peace | Sanity | Security | Wisdom |

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

The art of walking is at once suggestive of the dignity of man. Progressive motion alone implies power, but in almost every other instance it seems a power gained at the expense of self-possession.

Art | Dignity | Man | Power | Self | Wisdom | Art |

Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.

Logic | Peace | Principles | Wisdom | Intellect |

Yin Shih Tsu

If meditation is aimed at curing an illness the practicer should forget all about the thought of curing it, and if it is for improving health he should forget all about the idea of improvement, because when mind and objects are forgotten everything will be void and the result thus achieved will be the proper one... If the thoughts of curing an illness and of improving health are clung to the mind will be stirred and no result can be expected.

Health | Improvement | Meditation | Mind | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Thought |