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

Hélène Cixous

Thought has always worked by opposition... By dual, hierarchized oppositions... Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples.

Law | Opposition | Thought | Wisdom |

Joseph Cook

A natural law is a process, not a power: it is a method of operation, not an operator. A natural law, without God behind it, is no more than a glove without a hand in it.

God | Law | Method | Power | Wisdom | God |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

Edward Coke, fully Sir Edward Coke

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason.

Law | Life | Life | Nothing | Reason | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

Unless the cause of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed.

Cause | Force | Hope | Law | Peace | Religion | Wisdom | Zeal |

James "Jim" L. Foster

Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible only to the willfully unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital; man always gets as he gives.

Administration | Law | Man | Principles | Wisdom |

Euripedes NULL

There is nothing more hostile to a city than a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway and this is no longer equal.

Law | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |

Felix Frankfurter

If facts are changing, law cannot be static.

Law | Wisdom |

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Imagination | Law | Nature | Truth | Wisdom |

Edwin Bradford Hall

Remember you have not a sinew whose law of strength is not action; not a faculty of body, mind, or soul, whose law of improvement is not energy.

Action | Body | Energy | Improvement | Law | Mind | Soul | Strength | Wisdom |

Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey

There are not enough jails, nor enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.

Enough | Law | People | Wisdom |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The law of diminishing returns holds good in almost every part of our human universe.

Good | Law | Universe | Wisdom |

Richard Hooker

Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is thy bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things do her homage, the very least as feeling her care; and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

Angels | Care | God | Harmony | Joy | Law | Men | Mother | Peace | Power | Wisdom | World |

Thomas Jefferson

Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended.

Ignorance | Law | Wisdom |