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

Harold Oxley

The fact is that we can find happiness only in serving others. Just as a car is designed to move, so is a man designed to serve. And if he looks for happiness in anything other than service and sacrifice, he will always be disappointed.

Character | Looks | Man | Sacrifice | Service | Will | Happiness |

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 |

Michael Novak

It is a mistake to base one’s hopes for happiness upon the enforcement of security and equality. In principle, both desires are insatiable... No individual or society is secure in a world of emergent probability and sin... To exercise liberty is to take risks, to embrace uncertainties.

Character | Equality | Individual | Liberty | Mistake | Security | Sin | Society | World | Society | Happiness |

Plotinus NULL

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul’s expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness.

Action | Character | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Happiness |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

When fate is adverse, a wise man can always strive for happiness and sail against the wind to attain it.

Character | Fate | Man | Wise | Fate | Happiness |

George Ripley

There are hosts of men, of the profoundest thought, who find nothing in the disclosures of science to shake their faith in the eternal virtues of reason and religion.

Character | Eternal | Faith | Men | Nothing | Reason | Religion | Science | Thought |

James H. Aughey

The great comprehensive truths, written in letters of living light on every page of our history, are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom, none but virtue; virtue, none but knowledge; and neither freedom nor virtue has any vigor or immortal hope except the principles of the Christian faith...

Character | Faith | Freedom | History | Hope | Knowledge | Light | Principles | Religion | Security | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |

W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross

It would be a mistake to found a natural science on ‘what we really think’ ... opinions are interpretations, and often misinterpretations, of sense-experience; and the man of science must appeal from these to sense-experience itself, which furnishes his real data. In ethics no such appeal is possible... the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a natural science.

Character | Convictions | Ethics | Experience | Man | Mistake | People | Science | Sense |

Arthur Rubenstein

I must accept life unconditionally. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.

Character | Life | Life | People | Happiness |

Francis Quarles

It is no happiness to live long, nor unhappiness to die soon; happy is he that hath lived long enough to die well.

Character | Enough | Happy | Unhappiness | Happiness |

Theodor Reik

The small share of happiness attainable by man exists only insofar as he is able to cease to think of himself.

Character | Man | Happiness | Think |

Moshe Rosenstein, fully Moshe ben Chaim Rosenstein

A person who makes his happiness dependent on material or physical pleasures will never be guaranteed happiness. There is always something that might happen to destroy his happiness and success. The only guarantee for happiness is to find happiness in spiritual growth.

Character | Destroy | Growth | Guarantee | Success | Will | Happiness |

Philip Skelton

Our principles are the springs of our actions; our actions, the springs of our happiness or misery. Too much care, therefore, cannot be taken in forming our principles.

Care | Character | Principles | Happiness |

Alexander Smith

When a men is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness.

Character | Effort | Happy | Men | Happiness |