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

John Sterling

The worst education which teaches self-denial is better than the best which teaches everything else and not that.

Better | Character | Education | Self | Self-denial | Wisdom |

Harold W Thompson

There be four good mothers who have four bad daughters: Truth hath Hatred, Prosperity hath Pride, Security hath Peril, and Familiarity hath Contempt.

Character | Contempt | Familiarity | Good | Peril | Pride | Prosperity | Security | Truth |

Frederick K. Stamm

When no new thoughts fill the mind - when no horizons beckon - when life is in the past, not in the future - you are on the way to uselessness.

Character | Future | Life | Life | Mind | Past |

Henry Gardiner Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Education | Ignorance | Nothing | Wisdom |

Apocrypha NULL

What is the grossest form of neglect? If a man does not... devote every effort toward the education of his children.

Children | Education | Effort | Man | Neglect | Wisdom |

John Greenleaf Whittier

The tissue of Life to be we weave with colors all our own, and in the field of Destiny we reap as we have sown.

Character | Destiny | Life | Life |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.

Future | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Sherwood Anderson

The whole object of education is, or should be, to develop mind. The mind should be a thing that works. It should be able to pass judgment on events as they arise, make decisions.

Education | Events | Judgment | Mind | Object | Wisdom |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided into even the minutes parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all.

Future | Past | Present | Time | Wisdom |

Daniel Webster

Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.

Character | Children | Control | Evil | Future | Habit | Passion | Prejudice | Self | Self-control | Society | Will |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

Destiny | Love | Wisdom |

Walter H. Wheeler, Jr.

Our whole free dynamic society’s future depends upon a continued growth of our sense of responsibility and morality in direct proportion to the increase in our material wealth.

Character | Dynamic | Future | Growth | Morality | Responsibility | Sense | Society | Wealth |

Hugh Lawson White

When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. the future is yet in your power.

Character | Future | Mind | Mistake | Past | Power | Reason | Wisdom |

Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.

Books | Character | Comfort | Destiny | Dignity | Ideas | Man | Mockery | Peace | Wisdom | Words | Work |

Yukteswar, fully Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, born Priyanath Karar NULL

Human conduct is ever unreliable until man is anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.

Character | Conduct | Effort | Future | Man | Will |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and one with, and the future is uncertain.

Future | Life | Life | Man | Past | Present | Wisdom |