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

Karen Horney, born Danielsen

The many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing.

Beauty | Eternity | Loneliness | Love |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning.

Body | Events | Knowledge | Learning | Memory | System | Time |

Louisa May Alcott

My parents never bound us to any church but taught us that the love of goodness was the love of God, the cheerful doing of duty made life happy, and that the love of one’s neighbor in its widest sense was the best help for oneself. Their lives showed us how lovely this simple faith was, how much honor, gratitude and affection it brought them, and what a sweet memory they left behind.

Church | Duty | Faith | God | Gratitude | Happy | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Parents | Sense |

Kahlil Gibran

Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life, my fellow men, is an island separated from all other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering the pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to your fellow men and far removed from their sympathy and understanding.

Dreams | Life | Life | Loneliness | Men | Solitude | Suffering | Sympathy | Understanding |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

The life given us by nature is short, but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.

Eternal | Life | Life | Memory | Nature |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Life | Life | Memory |

Bessie Anderson Stanley, fully Elizabeth-Anne "Bessie" Anderson Stanley

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much: Who has gained the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children: Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task: Who has left the world better than he has found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul: Who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it: Who has looked for the best in others and given the best he had: Whose life was an inspiration: whose memory is a benediction.

Appreciation | Beauty | Better | Children | Earth | Inspiration | Life | Life | Little | Love | Memory | Men | Respect | Soul | Success | World | Appreciation | Respect | Beauty | Poem |

Ned Rorem

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, then leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

Memory | Originality |

Ned Rorem

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

Inspiration | Memory |

Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Glory | Language | Loneliness | Pain | Solitude |

Plato NULL

Every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive.

Influence | Man | Means | Memory | Nature | Soul | Time | World |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

His heart was as great as the world but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Heart | Memory | World | Wrong |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Memory | Words |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fills the hour and the company, contented and contending.

Conversation | Happy | Little | Man | Memory | Men | Society | Spirit | Success | Sympathy | Will | Wit | Society |

Saint Catherine of Siena NULL

Love harmonizes the three powers of our soul, and binds them together. The will, with ineffable love, follows what the eye of the understanding has beheld; and, with its strong hand, it stores up in the memory the treasure that id draws from this love.

Love | Memory | Soul | Understanding | Will |

Robert Grudin

For all the psychological and physiological conditions which test integrity - fear, desire, hunger, fatigue, disaffection, anger, pain - have little reality in memory or anticipation but rather exist for the most part in the narrow immediacy of the present.

Anger | Anticipation | Desire | Fear | Hunger | Integrity | Little | Memory | Pain | Present | Reality |

Robert Grudin

The person of integrity is a continuous person, for whom the present is a point on a line drawn out of memory and into the willed future, rather than an unpredicted and unwieldy configuration which seems to operate under its own law. The person of integrity is no superman; he will be, from time to time, defeated, frustrated, embarrassed and completely surprised. but neither is he the common and regular dupe of circumstance, compelled (like some tourist with a pocket dictionary) to consult conscience and emotion at each new turn of events.

Conscience | Events | Future | Integrity | Law | Memory | Present | Time | Will |

Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh

What thou givest after thy death, remember that thou givest it to a stranger, and most times to an enemy; for he that shall marry thy wife will despise thee, thy memory and thine, and shall possess the quiet of thy labors, the fruit which thou hast planted, enjoy thy love, and spend with joy and ease what thou hast spared and gotten with care and travail.

Care | Death | Despise | Enemy | Joy | Love | Memory | Quiet | Wife | Will |

T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now history has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities. Think now she gives when our attention is distracted and what she gives, gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late what’s not believed in, or if still believed, in memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with till the refusal propagates a fear. Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

Attention | Courage | Cunning | Fear | Forgiveness | Giving | History | Knowledge | Memory | Tears | Thought | Think | Thought |