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

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!

Dirty | Instinct | Knowledge | Mystery | Reality | Soul | Spirit |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.

Earth | Man |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.

Joy | Life | Life | Little | Time |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction - so we are told.

Health | Life | Life | Money | Suffering | Work |

Vicki Robin

One day a young girl watched her mother prepare a ham for baking. At one point the daughter asked, “Mom, why did you cut off both ends of the ham?” “Well, because my mother always did,” said the mother. “But why?” “I don’t know—let’s go ask Grandma.” So they went to Grandma’s and asked her, “Grandma, when you prepared the ham for baking, you always cut off both ends—why did you do that?”

Balance | Dynamic | Life | Life | Little | Thought | Thought |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession.

Men |

Vannevar Bush

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable.

Age | World |

Vannevar Bush

The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

Association | Memory | Mind | Work | Association |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

The most enduring skill you can bring to the workplace is also one of the most important skills you always had to bring to reporting -- and that is the ability to learn how to learn.

Government | Important | Need | Society | Will | World | Society | Government | Old | Understand |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.

Energy | Harmony |

Dalia Mogahed

The first step in helping Muslim women improve their situation is to question the assumption that religious teachings are the root cause of women's societal struggles. We do so by understanding the tradition of gender justice in Islam and gaining an appreciation for the nuances of Islamic law and the diversity of internal debates within Islam.

Drew Curtis

Readers assume information carried by Mass Media is true solely because it appears there. While Mass Media asks its audience to treat all media matters with a degree of skepticism, no one actually does. People expect Mass Media to do that for them, but it doesn’t. Whether it should is another issue entirely.

Money | News | People | Statistics |

Drew Curtis

ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.

People | Question |

Elif Safak

The way we see what God is only a reflection of the way we see Anfsnna. If not God brings to our minds to fear and blame, it means that a great deal of fear and blame is flowing in our souls, but if we saw God full of love and compassion , we will be well

Joy | Pain | Universe | Will | Words | Gossip |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

If there were two princes in Christendom who had good will and courage, it would be very easy to reconcile the religious difficulties; there is only one Jesus Christ and one faith, and all the rest is a dispute over trifles.

God | Work | God |

Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.

Life | Life | Little | Passion | Pity | Time | Tragedy | Youth | Youth |

Ernest Becker

And so, the question for the science of mental health must be­come an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that re­flects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.

Absolute | Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Confidence | Order | Parents | Power | Question | Security | Self | Society | Terror | Understanding | Weakness | Worth | Society | Child | Think |

Ernest Dimnet

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

Balance | Happy | Little | Nothing | People | Work |

Hans Hoffman

Nobody would dispute that I'm giving him a centrality he doesn't generally have.

God | God |

Italian Proverbs

When a tree is falling, every one cries, down with it.