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

John Ford

Delay in vengeance gives a heavier blow.

Character | Delay | Vengeance |

Henry Fielding

Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.

Art | Body | Character | Good | Art | Happiness |

Frank Bunker Gilberth, Sr.

We're worn into grooves by Time - by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second rate or champions, each in his way in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness - achievement.

Achievement | Character | Day | Mind | Peace | Time | Will | Happiness |

Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Character | Love | Happiness |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.

Character | Destiny | Illusion | Longing | Man | Mind | Repose |

Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

Whatever can lead an intelligent being to the exercise or habit of mental enjoyment, contributes more to his happiness than the highest sensual or mere bodily pleasures. The one feeds the soul, while the other, for the most part, only exhausts the frame, and too often injures the immortal part... Let all seen enjoyments lead to the unseen fountain from whence they flow.

Character | Enjoyment | Habit | Soul | Happiness |

Newell Dwight Hillis

Our world is a college, events are teachers, happiness is the graduating point, character is the diploma God gives man.

Character | Events | God | Man | World | God | Happiness |

David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker

Human happiness is the true odour of growth, the sweet exhalation of work.

Character | Growth | Work | Happiness |

John Heuss

The place where forgiveness begins is a troubled, anxious heart. You will never be able to forgive anybody until you yourself are deeply disturbed. To be able to forgive we must come down from the citadel of pride, from the stronghold of hate and anger, from the high place where all emotions that issue from one's sense of being wronged shout only for vengeance and retaliation.

Anger | Character | Emotions | Forgiveness | Hate | Heart | Pride | Retaliation | Sense | Vengeance | Will | Forgiveness | Forgive |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Within you is a potential for happiness that does not diminish nor ripen over time.

Character | Time | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

Without virtue happiness cannot be.

Character | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |

Max Horkheimer

Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die.

Action | Better | Character | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Martyrs | Men | Patience | Struggle | Will | World | Happiness |

David Hume

Delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pain as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.

Character | Mankind | Pain | Passion | Rest | Taste | Happiness |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

If you had been looking for happiness in people and events, you discovered that it is not there. If you look to outer circumstances for your satisfaction cues, you will stay on an emotion seesaw... True joy is actually part of your nature... Events merely give us an excuse to feel it.

Character | Circumstances | Events | Joy | Nature | People | Will | Happiness |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Consumption, celebrity and the quest for perfection in this world are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: each successive acquisition and achievement will mean less than the one before. Diminishing returns are finally leading to diminished expectations about the promise of finding happiness without caring for our souls. Perhaps we are now ready to reject the hucksters of materialisms that have lured us down so many dead ends, and start again on the road that will lead us back to God.

Achievement | Character | Ends | God | Law | Perfection | Promise | Will | World | Happiness |

David Hume

Human happiness seems to consists in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition.

Action | Character | Indolence | Pleasure | Happiness |

David Hume

It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated.

Character | Faith | Instinct | Men | Perception | Reason | Repose | Universe |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

It is our daily duty to consider that in all circumstances of life, pleasurable, painful, or otherwise, the conduct of every human being affects, more or less, the happiness of others, especially of those in the same house; and that, as life is made up, for the most part, not of great occasions, but of small everyday moments, it is the giving to those moments their greatest amount of peace, pleasantness, and security, that contributes most to the sum of human good. Be peaceable. Be cheerful. Be true.

Character | Circumstances | Conduct | Duty | Giving | Good | Life | Life | Peace | Security | Happiness |

Narciso Irala

Happiness is not found, it is made. One can only give the seed of happiness to another. Each one must make it grow within himself.

Character | Happiness |

Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.

Character | Life | Life | Happiness |