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

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.

Depression | Life | Life | Mourning | Music | Vice |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

Abstract | Glory | Nothing | Sacrifice | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Life | Life | Words |

Ernest Becker

To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

Contempt | Family | Heart | Ideas | Individuality | Life | Life | Little | Man | Means | Mystery | Need | Pain | Pride | Solitude | Words | Yearnings |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course, I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.

People | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia, Karkov grinned and began. First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool. Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool.

Knowledge | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Abstract | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.

Ambition | Belief | Economics | Little | Mind | Music | Patriotism | People | Sense | Thought | Ambition | Old | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Blasphemy | Language | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.

Glory | Nothing | Sacrifice | Words |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Why are atoms so small?... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.

God | Music | Question | Science | Time | Unity | God | Old |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Future | Man | Means | Science | Technology | Words |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

These suppositions admitted; in order to recollect the familiar ideas, it would be sufficient to be capable of giving attention to some of our fundamental ideas, with which they are connected. Now this is always feasible; because, so long as we are awake, there is not an instant in which our constitution, our passions, and our situation, do not occasion some of those perceptions which I call fundamental.

Doubt | Impression | Music |

Eudora Welty

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

Ambiguity | Words |

Eugene Peterson

The mistake we so often make is thinking that GodÂ’s interest and care for us waxes and wanes according to our spiritual temperature.

God | Lord | Sense | Words | God |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Our wants are all dependent upon one another, and the perceptions of them might be considered as a series of fundamental ideas, to which we. might reduce all those which make a part of our knowledge.

Imagination | Music |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Memory, as we have seen, consists only in the power of reviving the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances that attended them; a power which never takes place, except when by the analogy of the signs we have chosen, and by the order we have settled between our ideas, the objects which we want to revive are connected with some of our present wants.

Words | Trouble |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Thus the most natural order of ideas required, that the government should precede the verb: they said, for example, fruit to want.

Music | Reason |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

The progress of the operations, whose analysis and origin have been here explained, is obvious. At first, there is only a simple perception in the mind, which is no more than the impression it receives from external objects.

Language | Music |