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

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.

Love | Child | Understand |

Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

I think the Peace Corps is a fine thing, don't you? he said. Well, I replied, it's certainly better than War Corps.

Love | Question | Old |

Erin McKean

Singing is probably the better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and itÂ’s cheaper, too.

Love |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek.

Better | Life | Life | Love |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

Next to hot chicken soup, a tattoo of an anchor on your chest, and penicillin, I consider a honeymoon one of the most overrated events in the world.

Love |

Esther Baldwin York

Some of the best friends we have are books. Why? Well, they belong usually to our relaxed armchair hours. They come only if chosen; hence they suit the mood or the taste, whether for humor, fantasy, adventure or mystery. In a trice they can take us with them to far places and other times. Best of all, they don't talk back or force themselves upon us, but, like patient, loving friends, wait until we give them our attention. And always, they are as near as our bookshelf when we need them.

Love |

Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods. And yet paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher. And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called 'wounded healers.'

Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Fish, the old man said. Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

Day | Kill | Love | Respect | Will | Respect |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her

Duty | Honor | Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

His choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either one of us.

Love | Time | Talent | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

Books | Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe, the older waiter said. With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night. I want to go home and into bed. We are of two different kinds, the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.

Love | Thought | Think | Thought |

Ernest Becker

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the others, disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.

Experience | Love | Man | Nature | Order | Understand |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I sin?

Better | Love | Marriage | Story | War |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness: but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

Love | Time | Talent | Think |

Ernest Callenbach

Ecotopians … had always regarded anthropology as a field with great practical importance. After Independence they had begun to experiment in adapting anthropological hypotheses to real life. It was only over a great deal of resistance that a radical idea such as ritual warfare had become legally practicable … But its advocates had persisted, convinced … that it was essential to develop some kind of open civic expression for the physical competitiveness that seemed to be inherent in man’s biological programming – and otherwise came out in perverse forms, like war.

Love | People | Sense | Talking |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.

Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.

Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.

Art | Love | Art |