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

Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Belief | Character | Chastity | Lying | Man | Infidelity | Happiness |

William Lyon Phelps

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.

Belief | Character | Fallacy | Life | Life | Time | Youth | Youth |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

It behooves a father to be virtuous if he expects his son to be more virtuous than he has been.

Character | Father |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

The principal reason for sex deification is loss of belief in God. Once men lose God, they lose the purpose of life; and when the purpose of living is forgotten, the universe becomes meaningless. Man then tries to forget his emptiness in the intensity of a momentary experience.

Belief | Character | Experience | God | Life | Life | Man | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Universe | Loss |

Albert Schweitzer

Whatever you have received more than others - in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a pleasant childhood, in harmonious conditions of home life - all this you must not take to yourself as a matter of course. In gratitude for your good fortune, you must render in return some sacrifice of your own life for another life.

Ability | Character | Childhood | Fortune | Good | Gratitude | Health | Life | Life | Sacrifice | Success |

Jeremy Taylor

No man can be provident of his time, who is not prudent in the choice of his company.

Character | Choice | Man | Time | Wisdom |

Jesse William Stitt

What we think of ourselves makes a difference in our lives, and belief in immortality gives us the highest values of ourselves. When we so believe, we achieve proportions greater than mere matter.

Belief | Character | Immortality | Think |

Yitzchok Waldshein

Regardless of where a person actually is physically, he is really where his thoughts are. A person constantly has a choice to think elevated and uplifting thoughts or negative, self-destructive thoughts. How old you feel is greatly dependent on your attitude about yourself. Elderly people can increase their vitality and vigor by considering themselves young.

Character | Choice | People | Self | Old | Think |

John M. Wilson, fully John Moulder Wilson

Let's learn and label properly Disappointment and Discouragement for what they are - two completely different states of mind. Disappointment can be a spur to improvement that will contribute to success. But Discouragement is a mortal enemy that destroys courage and robs one of the will to fight. It is not circumstance that causes Discouragement, but one's own reaction to that circumstance. Everyone must meet Disappointment, many times; it is simply a part of life. When it is met, we may resign ourselves to Discouragement and failure. Or we may recognize each Disappointment as an asset by which we can profit, and take new strength from a lesson learned. The choice is ours, each time, to make.

Character | Choice | Courage | Enemy | Failure | Improvement | Lesson | Life | Life | Mind | Mortal | Strength | Success | Time | Will | Wisdom | Circumstance | Learn |

Shmuel Tzvi of Alexander, fully Admor Shmuel Tzvi Dantziger from Alexander, aka Samuel Alexander

If a person is indecisive about which of two courses of action to take, the question to ask himself is: “Which choice will bring more honor to the Almighty?” The reply to this question is the path to choose.

Action | Character | Choice | Honor | Question | Will |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: there is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; we must love one another or die.

Authority | Choice | Hunger | Love | Man | Wisdom |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time.

Acceptance | Beauty | Belief | Character | Desire | Existence | Faith | God | Health | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Beauty | God | Poem | Thought | Understand |