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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it.

Character | Man | Talent | Happiness |

François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

Time is given us that we may take care for eternity; and eternity will not be too long to regret the loss of our time if we have misspent it.

Care | Character | Eternity | Regret | Time | Will | Loss |

Henry Fielding

Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.

Art | Body | Character | Good | Art | Happiness |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

What can be the aim of withholding from children, or let us say from young people, this information about the sexual life of human beings? Is it a fear of arousing interest in such matters prematurely, before it spontaneously stirs in them? Is it a hope of retarding by concealment of this kind the development of the sexual instinct in general, until such time as it can find its way into the only channels open to it in the civilized social order? Is it supposed that children would show no interest or understanding for the facts and riddles of sexual life if they were not prompted to do so by outside influence? Is it regarded as possible that the knowledge withheld from them will not reach them in other ways? Or is it genuinely and seriously intended that later on they should consider everything connected with sex as something despicable and abhorrent from which their parents and teachers wish to keep them apart as long as possible? I am really at a loss so say which of these can be the motive for the customary concealment from children of everything connected with sex. I only know that these arguments are one and all equally foolish, and that I find it difficult to pay them the compliment of serious refutation.

Character | Children | Concealment | Fear | Hope | Influence | Instinct | Knowledge | Life | Life | Order | Parents | People | Time | Understanding | Will | Loss |

Joe Flying Bye

In this modern time you have to do your best yourself. That’s your answer to “What is life?” You must do it yourself. Your doing, your thinking. The answers to the meaning of life are inside you.

Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Thinking | Time |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you wish the blossom of the early and fruit of the late years, Wish what is charming and exciting, as well as nourishing and substantial. Wish to capture in one name heaven and earth.

Character | Earth | Heaven | Wisdom |

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, also Rabbi Moses Feinstein

Influencing someone for a short time is valuable in itself and never feel discouraged because the influence does not last as long as you would wish.

Character | Influence | Time |

Benjamin Franklin

There was never yet a truly great man that was not able at the same time to be truly virtuous.

Character | Man | Time |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Our best hope for the future is that the intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee that it would not fail to concede to human emotions, and to all that is determined by them, the position to which they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised by such a domination of reason would prove to be the strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare the way for further unifications. Whatever, like the ban laid upon thought by religion, opposes such a development is a danger for the future of mankind.

Character | Danger | Emotions | Force | Future | Guarantee | Hope | Mankind | Men | Mind | Nature | Position | Reason | Religion | Spirit | Thought | Time | Danger | Intellect | Thought |

Arnold Geulincx

My will does not produce the motive power to move my limbs. Rather, he who imparted motion to matter, and ordained its laws, shaped my will also; he thus joined together two utterly different things - the movement of matter and the decision of my will in such a way that whenever my will desires some action, the desired bodily movement will occur and vice versa, without there being any causation involved, or any influence of the one upon the other. It is just as if there were two clocks appropriately adjusted with reference to each other and the time of day in such a way that when one struck the hour the other immediately did likewise.

Action | Character | Day | Decision | Influence | Power | Time | Will | Vice |

Frank Bunker Gilberth, Sr.

We're worn into grooves by Time - by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second rate or champions, each in his way in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness - achievement.

Achievement | Character | Day | Mind | Peace | Time | Will | Happiness |

Thomas Hobbes

Continual success in obtaining those things which a man form time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call felicity; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Character | Desire | Fear | Life | Life | Man | Men | Mind | Sense | Success | Time | Tranquility |

Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes

Every time you give another a "piece of your mind," you add to your own vacuum.

Character | Mind | Time |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

As a wise man in time of peace prepares for war.

Character | Man | Peace | Time | War | Wise |

Henry Home, Lord Kames

No man ever did a designed injury to another, but at the same time he did a greater to himself.

Character | Man | Time |

W. T. Grant, fully William Thomas Grant

It must be obvious to those who take the time to look at human life that its greatest values lie not in getting things, but in doing them, in doing them together, in all working toward a common aim, in the experience of comradeship, of warmhearted 100% human life.

Character | Experience | Life | Life | Time |

Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Character | Love | Happiness |

Richard Hill

Life is but one continual course of instruction. The hand of the parent writes on the heart of the child the first faint characters which time deepens into strength so that nothing can efface them.

Character | Heart | Life | Life | Nothing | Strength | Time | Child | Parent |

Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

Whatever can lead an intelligent being to the exercise or habit of mental enjoyment, contributes more to his happiness than the highest sensual or mere bodily pleasures. The one feeds the soul, while the other, for the most part, only exhausts the frame, and too often injures the immortal part... Let all seen enjoyments lead to the unseen fountain from whence they flow.

Character | Enjoyment | Habit | Soul | Happiness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable.

Character | Impatience | Men | People | Time | Unhappiness |