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

James Allen

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

Choice | Lord | Right |

Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall

We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place--or not to bother.

Better | Choice | Life | Life | World |

Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner

For a choice of pedagogy inevitably communicates a conception of the learning process and the learner. Pedagogy is never innocent. It is a medium that carries its own message.

Choice | Learning |

John Adams

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

Choice | Metaphysics | Power | Thought | Thought |

Jean-Paul Sartre

Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.

Choice | Ends | Psychoanalysis | Taste | Value |

Jesse Helms, fully Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr.

Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals.

Choice | Government | Society | Society | Government |

John Newton, fully John Henry Newton

Too many show, in this respect, that they are dead while they live; dead to God, insensible and regardless of their many obligations to him, in whom they live, and move, and have their being. They live without prayer; they offer no praises to the God of their lives, but rise up and lie down, go out and come in, without one reflection on his power, goodness, and providence; even like the beasts that perish. But the awakened soul cannot do so. He trembles to think that he once could neglect that God whom all the hosts of heaven worship; and is convinced, that however fair his character might have been amongst men, he justly deserved to have been struck to hell.

Character | God | Heaven | Neglect | Reflection | Soul | God | Think |

John Dewey

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Choice | Self |

John Finnis

We come to understand the nature of the human person by coming to understand human capacities, which we come to understand by coming to understand human acts, which we come to understand by coming to understand the objects of those acts. The neglect of this methodological principle, a principle announced and applied by St. Thomas from beginning to end of his works, can seriously distort ethical discourse

Beginning | Nature | Neglect | Understand |

Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman

Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.

Choice | Initiative | Success | Will |

John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis

The organization and constant onward sweep of this movement exemplifies the resentment of the many toward the selfishness, greed and the neglect of the few.

Greed | Neglect | Organization | Resentment |

John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

Capitalism | Choice | Day | Decision | Enough | Good | Public | World |

John Taylor Gatto

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

Choice | Mind | Power |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line...To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth -- disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.

Art | Beginning | Choice | Faith | Justification | Life | Life | Light | Mankind | Men | Passion | Regret | Sincerity | Tenderness | Terror | Truth | Vision | Work | Art |

Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil--that is moral guilt.

Guilt | Imagination | Individual | Law | Misfortune | Moral law | Neglect | Submission | Misfortune | Guilty |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. It is not possible that this unity of knowledge,feelings,and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago;rather,this knowledge,feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all people,nay in all sensitive beings.

Choice | Eternal | Unity |

Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn

It is the sin of the soul to force young people into opinions - indoctrination is of the devil - but it is culpable neglect not to impel young people into experiences.

Devil | Force | Neglect | People | Sin | Soul |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

One man does not assert the truth which he knows, because he feels himself bound to the people with whom he is engaged; another, because the truth might deprive him of the profitable position by which he maintains his family; a third, because he desires to attain reputation and authority, and then use them in the service of mankind; a fourth, because he does not wish to destroy old sacred traditions; a fifth, because he has no desire to offend people; a sixth, because the expression of the truth would arouse persecution, and disturb the excellent social activity to which he has devoted himself. One serves as emperor, king, minister, government functionary, or soldier, and assures himself and others that the deviation from truth indispensable to his condition is redeemed by the good he does. Another, who fulfills the duties of a spiritual pastor, does not in the depths of his soul believe all he teaches, but permits the deviation from truth in view of the good he does. A third instructs men by means of literature, and notwithstanding the silence he must observe with regard to the whole truth, in order not to stir up the government and society against himself, has no doubt as to the good he does. A fourth struggles resolutely with the existing order as revolutionist or anarchist, and is quite assured that the aims he pursues are so beneficial that the neglect of the truth, or even of the falsehood, by silence, indispensable to the success of his activity, does not destroy the utility of his work. In order that the conditions of a life contrary to the consciousness of humanity should change and be replaced by one which is in accord with it, the outworn public opinion must be superseded by a new and living one. And in order that the old outworn opinion should yield its place to the new living one, all who are conscious of the new requirements of existence should openly express them. And yet all those who are conscious of these new requirements, one in the name of one thing, and one in the name of another, not only pass them over in silence, but both by word and deed attest their exact opposites.

Aims | Change | Consciousness | Desire | Destroy | Deviation | Doubt | Existence | Good | Government | Humanity | Indispensable | Life | Life | Man | Means | Men | Neglect | Opinion | Order | People | Position | Public | Regard | Reputation | Sacred | Service | Silence | Society | Soul | Success | Truth | Society | Government | Old |

Leo Busacaglia

Happiness and love are just a choice away.

Choice | Love |