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

William James

No human being ever learns to live until he has awakened to the dormant powers within him

Lying |

William Godwin

Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.

Better | Conduct | Consideration | Family | Father | Improvement | Justice | Justify | Life | Life | Lying | Magic | Man | Sense | Truth | Understanding | Will | Work | Worth | Vice |

William Morris

Speak but one word to me over the corn, over the tender, bowed locks of the corn.

Aesthetic | Concealment | Corruption | Dreams | Indulgence | Life | Life | Lying | Nothing | Restraint | Will |

Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.

Lying | Story |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.

Ambition | Lying | Ambition |

Dugald Stewart

Inclination is another word with which will is frequently confounded. Thus, when the apothecary says, in Romeo and Juliet,— “My poverty, but not my will, consents; Take this and drink it off; the work is done.” the word will is plainly used as synonymous with inclination; not in the strict logical sense, as the immediate antecedent of action. It is with the same latitude that the word is used in common conversation, when we think of doing a thing which duty prescribes, against one’s own will; or when we speak of doing a thing willingly or unwillingly.

Acquaintance | Attainment | Books | Correctness | Grace | Language | Lying | Men | Merit | Purity | Reading | Style | Taste | Writing |

William Shakespeare

Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest, and despair most fits. All's Well That Ends Well (Helena at II, i)

Lying | Men |

Edwin Arlington Robinson

A word has its use, Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave.

Lying |

Edwin Percy Whipple

Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.

Ideas | Lying |

Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the people of Tibet will be scattered like ants across the world and the dharma will come to the land of the red man.

Age | Lying | People | Sense |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Darkness | Light | Lying | Self |

William Shakespeare

SALERIO: Why, I am sure if he forfeit thou wilt not take his flesh. What's that good for? SHYLOCK: To bait fish withal—if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.

Death | Lying | Woman | Gossip |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument.

Day | Future | Heart | Love | Lying | Words |

Emile Zola

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

Display | Joy | Little | Lying | Style |

Emile Zola

The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.

Lying | Serenity |

Emile Zola

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Eternal | Giving | Love | Lying |

Emile Zola

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

Family | Lying | Means | Revolution |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

Only two pointed arrows betrayal of violence is similar to injure users of worse enemies.

Day | Ecstasy | Heaven | Lying | Music | World | Happiness |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.

Day | Lying |

Eugene P. Bertin, fully Eugene Peter Bertin

Teaching is leaving a vestige of one self in the development of another. And surely the student is a bank where you can deposit your most precious treasures.

Lying | Sacred |