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

Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.

Ignorance | Time |

Anthony Hope, fully Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins

In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction.

Ignorance | Little | Poetry |

Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.

Earth | Ignorance | Philosophy | Politics |

Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL

O Lord: my heart is made bitter by its own desolation; sweeten it by Your consolation. I beseech You, 0 Lord, that having begun in hunger to seek You, I may not finish without partaking of You. I set out famished; let me not return still unfed.

God | Receive | Will | God |

Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola

He who carries God in his heart bears heaven with him wherever he goes.

Life | Life | World |

Stephan Jay Gould

Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection... Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence.

Ability | Intelligence | Invention | Literature | Little | Nature | Receive | Story | World |

Stephan Jay Gould

But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the stuff of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any objective basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?

Altruism | Extreme | Nature | Speculation |

Theodore Parker

There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, composed of three subordinate and more simple ideas, namely: The idea that all men have unalienable rights; that in respect thereof, all men are created equal; and that government is to be established and sustained for the purpose of giving every man an opportunity for the enjoyment and development of all these unalienable rights. This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.

Age | Better | Censure | Comfort | Dirty | Doubt | Example | Luxury | Man | Men | Poverty | Sin | Society | Time | Wealth | World | Society | Loss | Happiness |

Theophrastus NULL

Chattiness, if one should wish to define it, would seem to be an incontinence of talk.?

Ignorance |

Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne

Nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, they both being servants of His Providence. Art is the perfection of Nature... Nature is the Art of God.

Ignorance | Man | Truth | Zeal |

Thomas Carlyle

All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.

Lying | Magic | Mankind |

Thomas Hobbes

In written laws, men ... make a difference between the letter and the sentence of the law: And when by the letter is meant whatsoever can be gathered from the bare words, 'tis well distinguished. For the significance of almost all words, are either themselves, or in the metaphorical use of them, ambiguous, and may be drawn in argument to make many senses, but there is only one sense of the law.

Ignorance | Men | Opinion | Reason |

Thomas Hobbes

Philosophy is a science about the reasons or about why?.

Devotion | Fear | Ignorance | Men | Talking |

Thomas Hobbes

From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in.

Abuse | Belief | Change | Credit | Distinguish | Doubt | Dreams | Evil | Fear | God | Ignorance | Man | Men | Need | Opinion | Past | People | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Religion | Right | Time | Vision | Wise | God | Think |

Thomas Hardy

It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it.

Ceremony | Chance | Consideration | Day | Husband | Little | Marriage | Nature | Society | Society |

Thomas Hobbes

For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body

Authority | Ignorance | Man | Memory | Men | Money | Nature | Sense | Wise | Words | Value |

Thomas Hardy

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Marriage | Men |

Thomas Jefferson

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Example | Ignorance | People | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.

Credit | Patriotism | Preference | Public | Redemption |