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

Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which any one can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Belief | Destiny | Enough | Guidance | Man | Surrender | Wise |

Henry Van Dyke

We create our fortune, for so the universe was wrought. Thought is another name for fate; choose they your destiny and wait, for love brings love, and hate brings hate.

Destiny | Fate | Fortune | Hate | Love | Thought | Universe | Thought |

Henry James

Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.

Contention | Destiny | Life | Life | Man | Peace | Society |

Herodotus NULL

The destiny of man is in his own soul.

Destiny | Man | Soul |

Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

The future destiny of a child is always the work of the mother.

Destiny | Future | Mother | Work | Child |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.

Destiny | Illusion | Man | Repose |

Plato NULL

Your destiny shall not be allotted to you, but you shall choose it for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot be the first to choose a life, which shall be his irrevocably. Virtue owns no master: he who honours her shall have more of her, and he who slights her, less.

Destiny | Life | Life | Virtue | Virtue |

Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt

To be a man of destiny is to arrive at a point in history when the only gift you have to offer has suddenly become relevant.

Destiny | History | Man |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Destiny |

Thomas Carlyle

The thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion.

Destiny | Duty | Enough | Heart | Man | Religion | Rest | Universe |

Wendell Phillips

On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.

Destiny | Nations |

Thomas Moore

The point in a relationship is not to make us feel good, but to lead us into a profound alchemy of soul that reveals to us any of the pathways and opening that are the geography of our own destiny and potentiality.

Alchemy | Destiny | Good | Relationship | Soul |

Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat

If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?

Destiny | Expectation | Experience | Future | History | Man | Past | Phenomena | Success | Truth | Expectation |

Emmet Fox

Your destiny depends entirely on your own mental conduct. It is the thoughts that you allow yourself to dwell upon all day long that makes your mentality what it is and circumstances are made by your mentality.

Circumstances | Day | Destiny |

F. L. Lucas, fully Frank Laurence "F. L." Lucas

It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its “stars."

Destiny | Important | Literature | Mankind | Will | World |

Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

Destiny | Man |