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

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.

Angels | Battle | Change | Death | Health | Heaven | Jealousy | Little | Love | Soul | Thinking | Think |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

In painting I want to say something comforting in the way that music is comforting.

Heart | Inspiration | Meaning | Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Change | Discovery | Earth | Little | Lord | Reading | Search | Sense | Society | Soul | Thinking | Truth | Society | Discovery | Think |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

Beauty | Imagination | Means | Men | Soul | Thought | World | Beauty | Old | Thought |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

I retain from nature a certain sequence and a certain correctness in placing the tones; I study nature, so as not to do foolish things, to remain reasonable. However, I don't mind so much whether my color corresponds exactly, as long as it looks beautiful on my canvas, as beautiful as it looks in nature.

Heart | Mind | Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

Eternal | Life | Life | Little | Meaning | Nature | Question | Rest | Revelation | Soul | Work | Old |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.

Hope | Nothing | Soul |

Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.

The white man has the marvelous ability to conceptualize. He has also the marvelous inability to distinguish between sacred and profane.

Man | Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

In a hundred years, on the other hand, I thought came to the threshold of the home, women will no longer be protected sex. Logically share all the assets and all the efforts that were once denied. The nurse will unload the coal. The greengrocer will drive the car. Each assumption based on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared, for example (in the street was having a platoon of soldiers) the idea that women, priests, and gardeners live longer. Remove this protection, exposing women to the same effort and the same activities, let them become soldiers, sailors, truck drivers and longshoremen, and you will find that women die much younger and much sooner than men, so that they will say: Today I saw a woman, as they say, Today I saw a plane. Anything can happen when the feminine will cease to be sheltered employment, I thought, opening the door.

Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?

Destroy | Dreams | Earth | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Style | Truth |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Here have lived for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths have left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing have left this.

Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, the falling fountains of the pendant trees. I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw with me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.

Courage | Dirty | Mind | Order | Soul |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul.

Agony | Conscience | Deeds | Judgment | Soul | Truth | Deeds |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

Violence must be put down! against cruelty make a stand, ye who would make sure of the reward of Good Thought through Right, to whose company the holy man belongs. His dwelling place shall be in thy House, O Ahura.

Blessings | Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.

Soul |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

So conscience for the sinner distorts the truth of the upright, but (his) soul is in agony at the judgment of the Chinvat Bridge, having strayed by his own deeds and tongue from the Path of Righteousness.

Body | Faith | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mankind | Power | Soul |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

Human opinions are formed by accident and hardened by repetition. We cling to acquired opinions only because they give the illusion of being wise opinions.

Soul |

Victor Hugo

He had been married and had had offspring. He did not know what had become of his wife and children. He had lost them the way he might have lost his handkerchief.

Beginning | Childhood | Darkness | Despair | Faith | Knowing | Man | Nothing | Soul | Time | Youth | Youth | Think |

Victor Hugo

I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Earth | Eternal | Future | Grave | Reflection | Soul | Sound | Waste | Will | Work | Writing |