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

Madame Émile de Girardin, Delphine de Girardin, née Gay

The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.

Change | Defeat | Power | Wisdom | Words |

Gersonides, abbreviation of first letters as RalBaG from Levi ben Gerson NULL

By means of rational thought we have reached the opinion that God knows in advance only the possibilities open to a man in his freedom, not the particular decisions he will make.. It is the opinion of our religion that God never changes... and yet we find in the words of the prophets that God does repent over some things... It is impossible to solve this contradiction if we adopt the view that God knows particular things as particulars.

Contradiction | Freedom | God | Man | Means | Opinion | Religion | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Words | God | Thought |

Jean-Baptiste Girard

By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life.

Life | Life | Wisdom | Words | Learn |

James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield

It is one of the many paradoxes of psychology that the pursuit of happiness defeats its own purpose. We find happiness only when we do not directly seek it. An analogy will make this clear. In listening to music at a concert, we experience pleasurable feelings only so long as our attention is directed towards the music. But if in order to increase our happiness we give all our attention to our subjective feeling of happiness, it vanishes. Nature contrives to make it impossible for anyone to attain happiness by turning into himself.

Attention | Experience | Feelings | Listening | Music | Nature | Order | Psychology | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |

Heinrich Heine

The essence of music is revelation... There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say it is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of a phenomena; a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual, and yet requiring rhythm; material, and yet independent of space... It is spirit, yet in need of time, rhythm; it is matter, yet independent of space.

Mind | Music | Need | Phenomena | Position | Revelation | Space | Spirit | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Thought |

Jascha Heifetz

Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend.

Beginning | Children | Civilization | Education | Friend | Individual | Music | People | Play | Reading | Regard | Time | Will | Wisdom |

Hugh Reginald Haweis

Although music appeals simply to the emotions, and represents no definite images in itself, we are justified in using any language which may serve to convey to others our musical expressions. Words will often pave the way for the more subtle operations of music, and unlock the treasures which sound alone an rifle, and hence the eternal popularity of song.

Emotions | Eternal | Language | Music | Popularity | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Words |

Heinrich Heine

Sir, do not mock our dreamers... Their words become the seeds of freedom.

Freedom | Wisdom | Words |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble while our hearts are so proud.

Sound | Wisdom | Words |

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

A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy - the smile that accepts a lover afore words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first-born baby.

Envy | Smile | Wisdom | Woman | Words |

Washington Irving

Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much, says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

Ideas | Language | Little | Man | Observation | Reflection | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

Jamake Highwater

The Indian... sees his music as indistinct from his dancing and his dancing as indistinct from his worship and his worship as indistinct from his living.

Music | Wisdom | Worship |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

The silence in our lives is under assault on all fronts: roaring jets and blasting Walkmans, numbing elevator music and blaring headline news. It’s hard to genuflect to the beat of MTV. We are wired, plugged in, constantly catered to and cajoled. After a while we become terrified out of the silence, unaware of what it has to offer. We drown out the simple question of God with the simplistic sound-bites of man.

God | Man | Music | News | Question | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | God |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes in our hearts.

Music | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

David Hume

So that, upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any ties between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected. And as we have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life. But there still remains one method of avoiding this conclusion, and one source which we have not yet examined.

Events | Life | Life | Meaning | Method | Nature | Power | Sense | Sentiment | Wisdom | Words |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Whatever you attach to the words I am is what you are claiming for yourself... Words are the lasers of human thought... Words, in fact, are random thoughts which have been brought together to become “coherent thought.”

Thought | Wisdom | Words |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

Lofty words cannot construct an alliance or maintain it; only concrete deeds can do that.

Deeds | Wisdom | Words | Deeds |

Roger Imhoff

Where there is no concern in the heart, there comes no music from the soul.

Heart | Music | Soul | Wisdom |