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

Aldous Leonard Huxley

We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility.

Character | Knowledge | Love |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.

Character | Conduct | God | Indispensable | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Virtue | Virtue | God |

José Iturbi

The only time you have a reputation is when you're not living up to it.

Character | Reputation | Time |

Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

It is a wretched thing to lean on the reputation of others, lest the pillars being withdrawn the roof should fall in ruins.

Character | Reputation |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

Character | Day | Reputation | War | Will |

John Locke

Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them... Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists. Where this perception is, there is knowledge, and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of knowledge.

Character | Disagreement | Ideas | Knowledge | Mind | Nothing | Object | Perception |

Chief Luther Standing Bear

Everything was possessed of personality, only different from us in form. Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty... Observation was certain to have its rewards. Interest, wonder, admiration grew, and the fact was appreciated that life was more than mere human manifestation; it was expressed in a multitude of forms. This appreciation enriched Lakota existence. Life was vivid and pulsating; nothing was casual and commonplace. The Indian lived - lived in every sense of the word - from his first to his last breath.

Admiration | Appreciation | Beauty | Blessings | Books | Character | Earth | Existence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Observation | Personality | Sense | Wonder | World | Appreciation |

John Locke

The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The existence of a God, reason clearly makes known to us, as has been shown. The knowledge of existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connection of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history.

Character | Existence | God | History | Intuition | Knowledge | Man | Memory | Mind | Reason | World | God |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The lack of wealth is easily repaired; but the poverty of the soul is irreparable.

Character | Poverty | Soul | Wealth |