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

Emma Goldman

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder... Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.

Children | Joy | Little | People | Tears |

English Proverbs

No living man all things can.

Joy |

Ernest Becker

We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffer­ing and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.

Comfort | Despair | Destroy | Doubt | Dread | Failure | Ideas | Joy | Life | Life | Little | Man | Reality | Self-knowledge | Sense | Failure |

Ernest Becker

In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.

Ability | Character | Comfort | Consciousness | Defense | Fear | God | Ideas | Joy | Madness | Man | Meaning | Means | Men | People | Promise | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Wants | God | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I thought I paid for everything. Not like women, pay and pay and pay. There is not a reward or punishment. Just exchange of values. Something comparable to, and in return you get something else. Or work for the sake of something. Anyway after all, at least partially good pay. Much of what I was paying, like me, and I had a good time. You pay either the knowledge or experience, or risk, or money. Enjoy life is nothing like the ability to get something equivalent expended money and realize it. And to get the full price for your money you can. Our world - a solid company. Excellent as a theory. In five years, I thought, it seems to me the same stupid, like all my other superior theory.

Good | Joy | Life | Life | Money | Order | Reward | Thought | Work | World | Worth | Learn | Thought |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is

Awe | Heart | Joy | Light | Man | Men | Pain | Self | Time | Woman |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The thought that you think, you think, which attracts to it - so you think it some more, which attracts to it - so you think it some more. In other words, when you have an expectation, you've got a dominant thought going on, and Law of Attraction is going to deliver that to you again and again and again.

Joy | Life | Life | Money | Success |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

You cannot receive vibrationally something that you are not a vibrational match to. And so, bless those who are finding abundance. And in your blessing of them and their abundance, you will become abundant too.

Awareness | Death | Experience | Good | Joy | Life | Life | Plenty | Promise | Awareness | Value |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The law of attraction is most understood when you see yourself as a magnet getting more and more of the way you FEEL.

Achievement | Attainment | Body | Joy | Money | Possessions | Property | Success |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

Beauty | Books | Freedom | Joy | Mystery | Need | Beauty |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!

Beauty | Joy | Life | Life | Unity | Beauty |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

For a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life . . . to life itself. I caught a glimpse of something greater than myself.

Beauty | Dawn | Freedom | Fulfillment | Good | Joy | Life | Life | Lying | Past | Peace | Sound | Unity | Vision | Beauty | Old |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.

Change | Heart | Joy | Looks | People | Rest | Time |

Eugenio Montale

But you have to go to the East to understand what the religion . I really understood the religious sentiment only there; religions is the true home of the East. And, after all, Catholicism is an Eastern religion, which has spread everywhere, but perhaps only the spirit of those countries can assimilate and accept it totally.

Joy |

Euripedes NULL

There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.

Joy | Peace |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Joy |

Felix Adler

The ethical element of religion has ever been its truly vital and quickening force. It is this which lends such majesty to the speeches of the Prophets, which gives such ineffable power and sweetness to the words of Jesus. Has this ethical element become less important in our age? Has the need of accentuating it become less imperative?

Darkness | Joy | Light | Man | Universe | World |

Ezra Taft Benson

One good yardstick as to whether a person might be the right one for you is this: in her presence, do you think your noblest thoughts, do you aspire to your finest deeds, do you wish you were better than you are?

Appearance | Change | Character | Day | Disgrace | Heart | Important | Injustice | Injustice | Joy | Lesson | Pain | Parents | Peace | Play | Resolution | Understanding | Circumstance | Teacher |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith.

Joy | Light | Mind | Sense | Thinking | Thought | Time | Thought |