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

Erin McKean

sometimes, it seems to me that, the smaller the things is that people want, the bigger the disappointment when they don't get it, or it's not exactly right -dora

Better | Opportunity | People | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.

Chance | Light |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

This is a good place, he said. There's a lot of liquor, I agreed.

Chance | Light | Work |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own "system" and accuses every other "system" as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both.

Labor | Purpose | Purpose |

Eudora Welty

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

Respect | Sense | Respect |

Eudora Welty

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

Experience | Life | Life | Think |

Eudora Welty

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

Behavior | Conduct | Feelings | Good |

Eudora Welty

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion all in one.

Insight | Learn |

Eudora Welty

ThereÂ’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if IÂ’d gotten sunburned.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Work |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalising actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrel's delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naïve.

Advice | Age | Opportunity | Television |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.

Business | Business |

Ezra Taft Benson

As we cleanse the inner vessel, there will have to be changes made in our own personal lives, in our families, and in the Church. The proud do not change to improve, but defend their position by rationalizing. Repentance means change, and it takes a humble person to change. But we can do it.

Better | Business | Children | Church | Family | Ideas | Influence | Means | Men | Opportunity | Parents | Reason | Religion | Youth | Youth | Business | Child | Teacher |

Ezra Taft Benson

Jefferson warned that we should not talk about confidence in men but that we should inhibit their power through the Constitution.

Blessings | Freedom | Opportunity | World |

Italian Proverbs

The right man comes at the right time.

Government | Looks | Means | Opportunity | Safe | Worry | Government | Think |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

Era | Invention | Parents |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.

Era |