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

Judy Tatelbaum

Grief is a wound that needs attention in order to heal. To work through and complete grief means to face our feelings openly and honestly, to express and release our feelings fully and to tolerate and accept our feeling for however long it takes for the wound to heal. We fear that once acknowledged grief will bowl us over. The truth is that grief experienced does dissolve. Grief unexpressed is grief that lasts indefinitely.

Attention | Character | Fear | Feelings | Grief | Means | Order | Truth | Will | Work |

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

If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God - for things cannot come to pass except they are preceded by efficient causes - but if there is no fixed and certain order of causes foreknown by God, all things cannot be said to happen according as He foreknew that they would happen... But it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He Who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills.

Fate | Free will | God | Nothing | Order | Will | Wills | Wisdom | God |

John Welwood

Look at our present life circumstances, whatever they may be, as the raw material of our learning... We must stop regarding ourselves as victims of circumstances, and start to acknowledge that we are not here purely by accident. The master within is trying to help us wake up by confronting us with our current life situation, which contains all the lessons we need to learn in order to grow into more fully developed human beings.

Accident | Character | Circumstances | Learning | Life | Life | Need | Order | Present | Learn |

Margaret Young, born Margaret Youngblood

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Character | Money | Need | Order | People | Will |

Simone Weil

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Character | Life | Life | Order | People | Suffering |

John Stuart Blakie

Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

Existence | Law | Order | Time | Truth | Wisdom |

Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

Governments which suppress freedom of speech... act like children who shut their eyes in order not to be seen.

Children | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Order | Speech | Wisdom |

William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

Law | Nature | Order | Play | Sense | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Man | Order | Wealth | Wisdom | Worship |

James Burgh

Before you think of retiring from the world, be sure you are fit for retirement; in order to which it is necessary that you have a mind so composed by prudence, reason, and religion, that it may bear being looked into; a turn to rural life, and a love of study.

Life | Life | Love | Mind | Order | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Religion | Retirement | Study | Wisdom | World | Think |

Nicholas Murray Butler

Time was invented by Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

Chance | God | Ideas | Order | Time | Wisdom | God |

William Ellery Channing

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Ignorance | Order | Pleasure | Smile | Wisdom |

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, also known as Mulock, Mrs Craik, Mrs Craik, Miss Mulok, Miss Muloch, Miss Mulock

"Order is Heaven's first law," and a mind without order can by no possibility be either a healthy or a happy mind.

Happy | Heaven | Law | Mind | Order | Wisdom |

Bette Davis, Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

Order | Wisdom | Work |

John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel

Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime.

Attention | Character | Charity | Conduct | Crime | Difficulty | Diplomacy | Events | Giving | Intrigue | Life | Life | Means | Men | Mystery | Order | Power | Providence | Purity | Selfishness | Service | Speech | Tact | Understanding | Wisdom | Wise |

Cleobulus NULL

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.

Enemy | Friend | Order | Service | Wisdom |

Tyron Edwards

True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"

Conservatism | Good | Necessity | Order | Power | Progress | Question | Wisdom | Old |