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

Theodore Refke

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.

Character | Madness | Nobility | Soul |

Joseph Gerrald

Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish; but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.

Aid | Discontent | Era | Eternal | Folly | Freedom | History | Madness | People | Principles | Purity | Reverence | Truth | Tyranny | Will | Wisdom |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Love | Madness | Reason | Wisdom |

Alexander Pope

Party-spirit at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Madness | Spirit | Wisdom |

Edward Young

Be wise to-day - ‘tis madness to defer.

Day | Madness | Wisdom | Wise |

Victor Hugo

A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism.

Ends | Madness |

Theodore Roethke

What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, my shadow pinned against a sweating wall, that place among the rocks--is it a cave, or winding path? The edge is what I have.

Madness | Nobility | Purity | Soul |

Gregory Vlastos

The machine is one of the most compelling rational of human discoveries. The madness is in those who would use a rational thing to further the irrational ends of exploitation and domination.

Ends | Madness |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Doubt | Jealousy | Madness |

George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good use.

Good | Madness | Sanity |

George Santayana

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that sustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit.

Body | Circumstances | Habit | Madness | Mind | Suffering |

George Santayana

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering set themselves no limit.

Body | Madness | Mind | Suffering |

James Bryant Conant

The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may; be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale.

Ambition | Authority | Bigotry | Diplomacy | Error | Madness | Power |