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

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

Behavior | People |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

Drugs Are the Religion of the People - The Only Hope is Dope

Behavior |

Thurgood Marshall

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

Practice |

Hugh Blair

True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us, and to the common nature which we all share. - It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of men. - It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.

Character | Good | Will |

Hugh Blair

I will not go so far as to say that the improvement of taste and of virtue is the same, or that they may always be expected to co-exist in an equal degree. More powerful correctives than taste can apply are necessary for reforming the corrupt propensities which too frequently prevail among mankind. Elegant speculations are sometimes found to float on the surface of the mind while bad passions possess the interior regions of the heart. At the same time, this cannot but be admitted, that the exercise of taste is, in its native tendency, moral and purifying.

Character | Imagination | Style |

William Shakespeare

Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked, or charitable, thou com'st in such a questionable shape, that I will speak to thee.

Character | History |

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Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.

Character | Future | Law |

William James

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Chance | Character | Emotions | Future | Life | Life | Sensibility | Time |

William James

Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior .

Anger | Cause | Character | Energy | Joy | Little | Means | Nothing | Pain | People | Pleasure | Self | Weakness |

William James

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Age | Character | Will | World |

William James

I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.

Character | Thought | Thought |

William James

Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.

Character | Circumstances | Security | Will | Woman |

William James

Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly.

Behavior | Determination | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Rule | Will |

William James

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

Angels | Character | Insight |

William James

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.

Character | Good | Hell | Maxims | Opportunity |

William James

Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

Behavior | Conduct | Organization |

William James

Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.

Character | Evolution | Right | System | Unhappiness |

William Law

There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.

Behavior | Death | Nature | Nothing | Perfection | Safe |

William James

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

Birth | Character | Emotions | Love | Meaning | Scripture | Spirit | Witness | Child | Crisis |

William Matthews

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than pleasures of youth.

Character |