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

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings, "how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?" "For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."

Awareness | Body | Death | Dreams | Fate | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Order | Will | World | Fate | Awareness |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

But I could tell thee of other things, Inglés, and do not doubt what thou simply cannot see nor cannot hear. Thou canst not hear what a dog hears. Nor canst thou smell what a dog smells. But already thou hast experienced a little of what can happen to man.

Earth |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids.

Body | Wants |

Ernest Becker

I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.

Character | Choice | Justification | Order | People | Prison | Reason | Self-esteem | Spirit | Terror | Truth | World | Child |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbitÂ’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbitÂ’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

Earth | Time |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Day | Earth | Good |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

We've got a generation now who were born with semi-equality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attaché cases and our three-piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.

Earth | Love |

Ernest Becker

For all organisms, then, opposing and obliterating power is evil – it threatens to stop experience. But men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it.

Body | Contradiction | Man | People | Worth |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

And that was the end of the beginning of that

Better | Body | Happy | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

Better | Body | Happy | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water'.

Earth | Men | Need | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.

Earth | Little | Man | Men |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick.

Earth | Nothing | Wonder | World | Afraid |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

She's vicious,' Miss Stein said. 'She's truly vicious, so she can never be happy except with new people. She corrupts people.

Earth | Nothing | Wonder | World | Afraid |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

Doctrine | Enemy | Humanity | Spirit | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Day | Revolution | Spirit |

Ernst Toller

As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.

Revolution | Spirit | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.

History | Society | Spirit | Will | Society |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

If your heart vibrate looking Resist oppression then silence is a form of treason because

Beauty | Life | Life | People | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Beauty |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

At the lowest stage, the rude--we may say animal--phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes. Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilization, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilized nations. To these alone--of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian--are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the organic world's development.

Arrogance | Earth | Illusion | Man | Mother | Organic | Position | Universe |