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

Arthur Schopenhauer

The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrine in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as these doctrines, you have the great mischief of a continual fraud.

Doctrine | Fraud | Nature |

Arthur Asher Miller

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

Absence | Action | Choice | Ends | Innocence | Need | Paradise |

Author Unknown NULL

Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.

Beauty | Innocence | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Ugly | Wholeness | Beauty |

Edmund Burke

Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.

Ambition | Avarice | Folly | Meanness |

Edmund Burke

Terrible consequences there will always be when the mean vices attempt to mimic the grand passions. Great men will never do great mischief but for some great end.

Consequences | Men | Will |

Edmund Burke

Idleness is the badge of the gentry, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active, and, if it is not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.

Body | Business | Cause | Devil | Discipline | Idleness | Melancholy | Mind |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Innocence |

Jeremy Bentham

Like flakes of snow that fall imperceptibly upon the earth, the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As snowflakes gather, so our habits are formed. No single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change. No single action creates, however it may exhibit a man's character. But as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting on the elements of mischief which pernicious habits have brought together, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue.

Action | Change | Character | Earth | Events | Life | Life | Man | Passion | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord; and the supreme arts of temperance, of justice, and of wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose utter name is, by their award, simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know.

Disease | Evil | Good | Harmony | Health | Ignorance | Innocence | Judgment | Justice | Men | Music | Wisdom |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great is the mischief of a legal crime.

Crime |

Ronald S. Miller

Spiritual teachers emphasize that by abandoning our preconceived ideas and ordinary perceptual filters, we can experience high states of consciousness, inexpressible delight, and a sense of innocence and mystery about existence... the transfiguration of life from a vale of tears into a celebration of truth and beauty.

Beauty | Consciousness | Existence | Experience | Ideas | Innocence | Life | Life | Mystery | Sense | Tears | Truth |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

Bring together all the children of the universe, you will see nothing in them but innocence, gentleness, and fear; were they born wicked, spiteful, and cruel, some signs of it would come from them; as little snakes strive to bite, and little tigers to tear. But nature having been of offensive weapons to man as to pigeons and rabbits, it cannot have given them an instinct to mischief and destruction.

Children | Fear | Gentleness | Innocence | Instinct | Little | Man | Nature | Nothing | Universe | Weapons | Will |

Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron

It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

Earth | Good | Heaven | Innocence | Life | Life | Object | Praise | Universe |

Irving Howe

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Innocence | Knowledge |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door.

Innocence | Knowing | Means | Mind | Mystery |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

To be lonely, that is to feel oneself isolated, having no relationship with anything; in that sense of loneliness there is despair - there are moods, one is familiar with that sense of loneliness - and one runs away from it by turning on the radio, by reading a book, by sex and ten different activities. That loneliness is the very essence of self-consciousness. And when one goes beyond that, there is this state of attention in which there is complete aloneness, which is not isolation, which is not separation, which is not a withdrawal. Because it is only this aloneness, when the mind is no longer a plaything of thought, when thought has been understood totally - then out of that comes this sense of aloneness. it is that which is innocence, and it is that innocence which is beyond all mortality.

Attention | Despair | Innocence | Loneliness | Mind | Reading | Relationship | Sense | Thought | Thought |

John Calvin

To “justify” means nothing else than to acquit of guilt him who was accused as if his own innocence were confirmed.

Guilt | Innocence | Means | Nothing |

John Milton

For stories teach us, that liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate age, brought Rome itself to a farther slavery: for liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given, but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need.

Freedom | Good | Happy | Liberty | Men | Skill | Teach |

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms, it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.

Generosity | Innocence | Presumption | Spirit |

Lewis H. Lapham

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see -- not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.

Business | Ceremony | Hope | Illusion | Innocence | Light | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Wealth | World | Business |