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

Otto Kahn, fully Otto Hermann Kahn

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Character | Cost | Freedom | Present | Submission | Surrender |

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

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America can do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Character | Freedom | Man | World |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

In the hour of death the only adequate consolation is that one has not evaded life, but has endured it. What a man shall accomplish or not accomplish, does not lie in his power to decide; he is not the One who will guide the world; he has only to obey... The point consists precisely in loving his neighbor, or, what is essentially the same thing, in living equally for every man. Every other point of view is a contentious one, however advantageous and comfortable and apparently significant this position may be... yet in the hour of death, he will confidently dare say to his soul: “I have done my best; whether I have accomplished anything, I do not know; whether I have helped anyone, I do not know; but that I have lived for them, that I do know, and I know it from the fact that they insulted me. And this is my consolation, that I shall not have to take the secret with me to the grave, that I, in order to have good and undisturbed and comfortable days in life, have denied my kinship to other men, kinship with the poor, in order to live in aristocratic seclusion, or with the distinguished, in order to live in secret obscurity.

Character | Consolation | Death | Good | Grave | Life | Life | Man | Men | Obscurity | Obscurity | Order | Position | Power | Seclusion | Soul | Will | World |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Reality comes into being only when the mind is still, not made still. Therefore, there must be no disciplining of the mind to be still. When you discipline yourself, it is merely a projected desire to be in a particular state. Such a state is not the state of passivity... Liberation is from moment to moment in the understanding of what is, when the mind is free, not made free. It is only a free mind that can discover, not a mind molded by a belief or shaped according to a hypothesis. Such a mind cannot discover. There can be no freedom is there is conflict, for conflict is the fixing of the self in relationship.

Belief | Character | Desire | Discipline | Freedom | Hypothesis | Mind | Reality | Relationship | Self | Understanding |

John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis

Often those who seek only license for their plundering, cry “liberty.” In the guise of this Old American ideal, men of vast economic domain would destroy what little liberty remains to those who toil. The liberty we seek is different. It is liberty fro common people - freedom from economic bondage, freedom from the oppressions of the vast bureaucracies of great corporations; freedom to regain again some human initiative, freedom that arises from economic security and human self-respect.

Character | Destroy | Freedom | Initiative | Liberty | Little | Men | People | Respect | Security | Self | Old |

Douglas Ellsworth Lurton

When you determine what you want, you have made the most important decision of your life. You have to know what you want in order to attain it.

Character | Decision | Important | Life | Life | Order |

Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Character | Freedom | Wisdom |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Obstinacy is the strength of the weak. Firmness founded upon principle, upon the truth and right, order and law, duty and generosity, is the obstinacy of sages.

Character | Duty | Firmness | Generosity | Law | Order | Right | Strength | Truth |

Eda J. LeShan

We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top.

Character | Children | Danger | Doctrine | Education | Failure | Fear | Majority | Religion | World | Danger | Failure |

Mustapha Mahmoud

At first glance, life appears meaningless, futile, full of contradictions and absurdities. But a deeper, meditating look uncovers beauty, order and harmony, revealing life as a supreme accomplishment of eternal wisdom... All of creation is an act of love and providence, a drama imbued with meaning... In simple words: Life is a mission of awareness and awakening and deep enlightenment. We are here to sense this divine presence beyond all phenomena. We are here to recognize a deep urge in our hearts to act in harmony, in conformity and in love with these divinities.

Accomplishment | Awakening | Awareness | Beauty | Character | Conformity | Enlightenment | Eternal | Harmony | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mission | Order | Phenomena | Providence | Sense | Wisdom | Words | Awareness |

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre

Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through is history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are a part to be construed... Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious strutters in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resource. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition fro heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.

Character | Children | Heart | History | Man | Men | Order | Practice | Question | Right | Sense | Society | Story | Tradition | Truth | Understanding | Words | Society | Learn | Understand |

Eda J. LeShan

We have kept our children so busy with “useful” and “improving” activities that we are in danger of raising a generation of young people who are terrified of silence, of being alone with their own thoughts.

Character | Children | Danger | People | Silence | Danger |

Walter Lippmann

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

Belief | Character | Error | Justify | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Order | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

John Locke

What is it that determines the Will in regard to our Actions?... we shall find, that we being capable but of one determination of the will to one action at once, the present uneasiness, that we are under, does naturally determine the will, in order to that happiness which we all aim at in all our actions: For as much as whilst we are under any uneasiness, we cannot apprehend ourselves happy, or in the way to it... And therefore that, which of course determines the choice of our will to the next action, will always be the removing of pain, as long as we have any left, as the first and necessary step towards happiness.

Action | Character | Choice | Determination | Happy | Order | Pain | Present | Regard | Will | Happiness |

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The rationalist’s dilemma: either the free act is possible, or it is not - either the event originates in me or is imposed on me from outside, does not apply to our relations with the world and with our past. Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it: as long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls up specially favoured modes of resolution, and also that it is powerless to bring one into being by itself.

Character | Destroy | Freedom | Past | Resolution | Wisdom | World |