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

Roy I. Bagley

Right thinking is a prerequisite to right living... In truth the destiny of any life is determined by what fills that mind.

Character | Destiny | Life | Life | Mind | Right | Thinking | Truth | Wisdom |

George Barrell Cheever

The habits of time are the soul's dress for eternity. Habit passes with its owner beyond this world into a world where destiny is determined by character, and character is the sum and expression of all preceding habit.

Character | Destiny | Eternity | Habit | Soul | Time | World |

Albert Einstein

It is only to the individual that a soul is given. And the high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

Character | Destiny | Individual | Rule | Soul |

Henry Ford

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what it is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.

Character | Destiny | Life | Life |

John Haynes Holmes

War some day will be abolished by the will of man. This assertion does not in any way invalidate the truth that war is fundamentally caused by impersonal, political, economic and social forces. But it is the destiny of man to master and control such force, even as it is his destiny to harness rivers, chain the lightning and ride the storm. It is human will, operating under social forces, that has abolished slavery, infanticide, dueling, and a score of other social enormities. Why should it not do the same for war?

Assertion | Character | Control | Day | Destiny | Force | Man | Slavery | Truth | War | Will | Wisdom |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.

Character | Destiny | Illusion | Longing | Man | Mind | Repose |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

A dimension is missing from ourselves and our culture which is reflected in our inability to reconcile the competing demands of our inner and outer lives. As a result, most of us make use of a very small portion of our possible consciousness and of our soul’s resources... The destiny of mankind depends on something as personal and intimate as the way each one of us chooses to live, think and behave.

Character | Consciousness | Culture | Destiny | Mankind | Soul | Think |

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

We still have it in our power to rise above the fears, imagined and real, and to shoulder the great burdens which destiny has placed upon us, not for our country alone, but for the benefit of all the world.

Character | Destiny | Power | World |

Francis Lieber

There is no right without parallel duty, no liberty without the supremacy of the law, no high destiny without earnest perseverance, no greatness without self-denial.

Character | Destiny | Duty | Greatness | Law | Liberty | Perseverance | Right | Self | Self-denial |

Austin Phelps

In the destiny of every moral being there is an object more worthy of God than happiness. It is character. And the grand aim of man's creation is the development of grand character - and grand character is, by its very nature, the product of probationary discipline.

Character | Destiny | Discipline | God | Man | Nature | Object | God |

Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

You sow the seeds of your destiny through the way you think, the way you plan, the way you fantasize, the way you deal with fellow beings.

Character | Destiny | Plan |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities than shedding tears and feeling anger at sight of the wickedness of man.

Anger | Character | Comedy | Destiny | Fate | Hazard | Influence | Man | Tears | Wickedness | Fate |

John Greenleaf Whittier

The tissue of Life to be we weave with colors all our own, and in the field of Destiny we reap as we have sown.

Character | Destiny | Life | Life |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

Destiny | Love | Wisdom |

Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.

Books | Character | Comfort | Destiny | Dignity | Ideas | Man | Mockery | Peace | Wisdom | Words | Work |

Max Brod

Our destiny repeats itself, because we create it.

Destiny | Wisdom |

Brillat-Savarin, fully Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin NULL

The destiny of countries (nations) depends on the way they feed themselves.

Destiny | Nations | Wisdom |