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

William Feather

Change, not habit, is what gets most of us down; habit is the stabilizer of human society, change accounts for its progress.

Change | Character | Habit | Progress | Society |

Owen Feltham

Works without faith are like a fish without water, it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action is as a stone laid.

Action | Character | Faith | Good | Wants |

Immanual Hermann Fichte

Our system of thought and opinion, is often the only history of our heart. Men do not so much will according to their reason, as reason according to their will.

Character | Heart | History | Men | Opinion | Reason | System | Thought | Will | Thought |

Henry Giles

The silent influence of books, is a mighty power in the world; and there is a joy in reading them known only to those who read them with desire and enthusiasm. Silent, passive, and noiseless though they be, they yet set in action countless multitudes and change the order of nations.

Action | Books | Change | Character | Desire | Enthusiasm | Influence | Joy | Nations | Order | Power | Reading | Wisdom | World |

Owen Feltham

Contemplation is necessary to generate an object, but action must propagate it.

Action | Character | Contemplation | Object | Wisdom |

Henry George

Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.

Action | Character | Right | Thought | Will | Wisdom |

Charles W. Garman

Whatever may be true of men’s creed, nothing is clearer than the fact that the personality and the sovereignty of God are not a large factor in the practical life and thought of our age.

Age | Character | Creed | God | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Personality | Thought | God | Thought |

Bernard Gilpin

The habit of virtue cannot be formed in the closet; good habits are formed by acts of reason in a persevering struggle with temptation.

Character | Good | Habit | Reason | Struggle | Temptation | Virtue | Virtue |

Jerome P. Fleishman

Do you know what real poverty is? It is never to have a big thought or a generous impulse.

Character | Impulse | Poverty | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Our best hope for the future is that the intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee that it would not fail to concede to human emotions, and to all that is determined by them, the position to which they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised by such a domination of reason would prove to be the strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare the way for further unifications. Whatever, like the ban laid upon thought by religion, opposes such a development is a danger for the future of mankind.

Character | Danger | Emotions | Force | Future | Guarantee | Hope | Mankind | Men | Mind | Nature | Position | Reason | Religion | Spirit | Thought | Time | Danger | Intellect | Thought |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

Action | Capacity | Character | Thought | Thought |

Robert Hall

If we look back upon the usual course of our feelings, we shall find that we are more influenced by the frequent recurrence of objects than by their weight and importance; and that habit has more force in forming our habits than our opinions have. The mind naturally takes its tone and complexion from what it habitually contemplates.

Character | Feelings | Force | Habit | Mind |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

Apology | Character | Habit | Wrong |

Heinrich Heine

Thought precedes action as lightning does thunder.

Action | Character | Thought | Wisdom |

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

Whatever can lead an intelligent being to the exercise or habit of mental enjoyment, contributes more to his happiness than the highest sensual or mere bodily pleasures. The one feeds the soul, while the other, for the most part, only exhausts the frame, and too often injures the immortal part... Let all seen enjoyments lead to the unseen fountain from whence they flow.

Character | Enjoyment | Habit | Soul | Happiness |

Richard M. Hare, fully Richard Mervyn Hare

It is, most fundamentally, because moral judgments are universablizable that we can speak of moral thought as rational (to universalize is to give the reason); and their prescriptivity is very intimately connected with our freedom to form our own moral opinions (only those free to think and act need a prescriptive language).

Character | Freedom | Language | Need | Reason | Thought | Think | Thought |

Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover

Words without action are the assassins of idealism.

Action | Character | Idealism | Words |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What is the true test of character, unless it be its progressive development in the bustle and turmoil, in the action and reaction of daily life?

Action | Character | Life | Life | Turmoil |

Hans Hoffman

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Character | Meaning | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |