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

Thomas Hobbes

We are not to renounce our senses and experience, nor (that which is the undoubted Word of God) our natural Reason. For they are the talents which he hath put into our hands to negotiate, till the coming again of our blessed savior, and therefore not to be folded up in the napkin of an implicate faith, but employed in the purchase of justice, peace, and true religion. For though there be many things in God's Word above Reason--that is to say, which cannot by natural reason be either demonstrated or confuted--yet there is nothing contrary to it.

Battle | Inclination | Nature | Time | Will |

Thomas Hobbes

In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition: secondly, diffidence: thirdly, glory. The first, maketh men invade for gain: the second, for safety: and the third, for reputation.

Cause | Desire | Inclination | Man | Mankind | Means | Power |

Thomas Hobbes

Emulation is grief arising from seeing one’s self exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him, in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill fortune that may befall him.

Battle | Inclination | Man | Men | Nature | Power | Time | War | Will |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!

Contemplation | Control | Decision | Father | Inclination | Light | Mother | Position | Qualities | Quiet | Sadness | Spirit | Parting | Contemplation | Old |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

Knowledge helps dormant intelligence to awake and become conscious which automatically brings so many additional advantages.

Inclination |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The trained mind is torn by fear; the pure elevated mind is placid and unruffled, like that of a homeless Sage.

Anger | Chance | Health | Inclination | Leisure | Man | Silence |

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and novel-reading, and crochet-needle, and the occasional manufacture of sponge cake.

Death | Inclination |

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

Tastes in young people are changed by natural impetuosity, and in the aged are preserved by habit.

Inclination |

William Shakespeare

O, my sweet sir, news fitting to the night, black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible.

Business | Enough | Guilt | Inclination | Man | Offense | Business |

Eleazar ha-Kappar, alternate spelling Eliezer ha-Kappar

The synagogues and Beth midrashs in Babylonia will in the time to come be planted in Eretz Israel.

Disrespect | Grave | Inclination | Will | Blessed |

Eugene Peterson

This devalues the experience of suffering.

Enthusiasm | Experience | Inclination | Little |