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

Madame de Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville

If only man could be induced to laugh more they might hate less, and find more serenity here on earth. If they cannot worship together, or accept the same laws, or tolerate the wonderful diversity of thought and behavior and physique with which they have been blessed, at least they can laugh together.

Behavior | Character | Diversity | Earth | Hate | Man | Serenity | Thought | Worship | Thought |

Madame de Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our duty and find in it our pleasures.

Character | Duty | Happy | Love |

Maurice Nicoll

It is in life that we have to ‘perfect’ ourselves. If we limit ‘this life’ to one single journey between birth and death there is not enough time. People give up trying, just because of this appearance of things. They do not bend the life round in a circle, but leave the whole matter to the ‘hereafter’. We cannot grasp that beyond the ‘end’ lies the beginning... Beyond our life we meet - our life. We cannot turn in any other direction!

Appearance | Beginning | Birth | Character | Death | Enough | Journey | Life | Life | People | Time |

Wilson Mizner

The worst-tempered people I've ever met were people who knew they were wrong.

Character | People | Wrong |

Robert Monroe, fully Robert Allen Monroe

Your destination seems to be grounded completely within the framework of your innermost constant motivations, emotions and desires.

Character | Emotions |

Paul Moody, fully Paul Dwight Moody

The measure of a man is not the number of his servants but in the number of people whom he serves.

Character | Man | People |

Yaakov Neiman

Some people ask why the righteous suffer in this world. To a great extent the question is based on a misconception. Often, the criteria people use to judge whether another person is living a good life or not is by his financial standard of living... A truly righteous person by definition lives a happy life. Such a person has internalized the awareness that all the occurrences in his life are for the good, and he has satisfaction from his life. His life has meaning and purpose. His whole being is focused on spiritual elevation. He deeply feels that the good life is to fulfill the will of the Almighty and hence he feels great pleasure in the good deeds that he performs.

Awareness | Character | Deeds | Good | Happy | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Pleasure | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Will | World | Deeds | Awareness |

Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan

There is no such thing as absolute truth... People are less deceived by failing to see the truth than by failing to see its limits.

Absolute | Character | People | Truth |

Avigdor Miller

If a person learns to be grateful to the Creator because he is allowed to awake in the morning, then every day is begun with a feeling of gratitude for an additional day of life.

Character | Day | Gratitude | Life | Life |

Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL

The most effective way of attacking vice is to expose it to public ridicule. People can put up with rebukes but they cannot bear being laughed at: they are prepared to be wicked but they dislike appearing ridiculous.

Character | People | Public | Ridicule | Vice |

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Time presupposes a view of time. It is, therefore, not like a river, not a flowing substance. The fact that the metaphor based on this comparison has persisted from the time of Heraclitus to our own day is explained by our surreptitiously putting into the river a witness of its course.

Character | Day | Time | Wisdom | Witness |

Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay

Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.

Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |

Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker

A career is born in public - talent in privacy.

Character | Public | Talent |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Love hates people to be attached to each other except by himself, and takes a laggard part in relations that are set up and maintained under another title, as marriage is. Connections and means have, with reason, as much weight in it as graces and beauty, or more. We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry must as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us. Therefore I like this fashion of arranging it rather by a third hand than by our own, and by the sense of other rather than by our own. How opposite is all this to the conventions of love!

Beauty | Character | Family | Love | Marriage | Means | People | Posterity | Practice | Race | Reason | Sense | Title |

Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL

The more powerful the obstacle, the more glory we have in overcoming it; and the difficulties with which we are met are the maids of honor which set off virtue.

Character | Glory | Honor | Virtue | Virtue |