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

Honoré de Balzac

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.

Character | Eternal | Ideals | Man | World | Truths |

George Bancroft

Beauty, like truth and justice, lives within us; like virtue, and like moral law, it is a companion of the soul.

Beauty | Character | Justice | Law | Moral law | Soul | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

Instinct gave place temporarily to a system of habits, each one of which became contingent, their convergence of which became contingent, their convergence towards the preservation of society being alone necessary, and this necessity bringing back instinct with it. The necessity of the whole, felt behind the contingency of the parts, is what we call moral obligation in general - it being understood that the parts are contingent in the eyes of society only; to the individual, into whom society inculcates its habits, the part is as necessary as the whole.

Character | Individual | Instinct | Necessity | Obligation | Society | System | Society |

John Bartlett

Custom governs the world; it is the tyrant of our feelings and our manners and rules the world with the hand of a despot.

Character | Custom | Despot | Feelings | Manners | World |

Bruce Bliven

Perhaps the most important lesson the world has learned in the past fifty years is that it is not true that "human nature is unchangeable."

Character | Human nature | Important | Lesson | Nature | Past | World |

William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall

You need more tact in the dangerous art of giving than in any other social action.

Action | Art | Character | Giving | Need | Tact | Art |

Phillips Brooks

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure and good, without the world being the better for it, without somebody being helped an comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

Better | Character | Existence | Good | Man | Woman | World |

Abel Bonnard

Emphasis on educational and vocational rehabilitation must not be allowed to overshadow the profound need that will exist for spiritual reorientation.

Character | Need | Will |

Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL

Through zeal knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal knowledge is lost; let a man who knows this double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow.

Character | Knowledge | Man | Zeal | Loss |

Hugh Blair

In the eye of that Supreme Being to whom our whole internal frame is uncovered, dispositions hold the place of actions.

Character |

Hermann Boerhaave

The great seal of truth is simplicity.

Character | Simplicity | Truth | Wisdom |

William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker

If you want to earn more - learn more. If you want to get more out of the world you must put more into the world. For, after all, men will get no more out of life than they put into it.

Character | Life | Life | Men | Will | World | Learn |

Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke

The simple truth is, that there has lived on the earth, “appearing at intervals,” for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.

Absence | Character | Death | Earth | Future | Life | Life | Little | Men | Nothing | Race | Time | Truth | Will |

Hugh Blair

The prevailing manners of an age depend, more than we are aware of, or are willing to allow, on the conduct of the women: this is one of the principal things on which the great machine of human society turns.

Age | Character | Conduct | Manners | Society | Society |