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 Cowper

But many a crime deemed innocent on earth is registered in heaven; and these no doubt have each their record, with a curse annex'd.

Religion |

William Cowper

How happy it is to believe, with a steadfast assurance, that our petitions are heard even while we are making them; and how delightful to meet with a proof of it in the effectual and actual grant of them.

Censure | Religion |

William Cowper

Pleasure is labor too, and tires as much.

Religion |

William Cowper

Then, shifting his side (as a lawyer knows how).

Harmony | Morality | Poetry | Virtue | Virtue | Wonder |

Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

As long as he fears or remembers insecurity, man is a competitive animal. Groups, classes, nations and races similarly insecure compete as covetously as their constituent individuals, and more violently, knowing less law and having less protection; Nature calls all living things to the fray.

Death | Life | Life | Mind | Religion | Will | Wise |

Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness.

Conscience | Injustice | Injustice | Religion | Sense | Guilty |

Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason.

Cause | Morality |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

Farmers are learning the relief they get from the sky beats what they get from Washington.

Religion |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

If this depression stays with us, the loser Tuesday is going to be the winner.

Church | People | Religion | Wonder |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

I will admit it has rained more under Republican administrations, that was partially because they have had more administrations than Democrats. There is no less sickness, no less earthquakes, no less progress, no less inventions, no less morality, no less Christianity under one than the other. They are all the same. It won't make 50 cents difference to a one of you. Unless you're foolish enough to bet on it.

People | Religion | Think |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

Man | Religion | Happiness |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Schools are not meant to make boys happy, Cécile, but to teach them to do without happiness.

Religion |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.

Freedom | Justification | Reading | Religion | Soul | World |

Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

Direct and easy communications — freedom of speech in all forms and in its broadest sense — has become vital to the very survival of a civilized humanity.

Fable | Play | Religion | Words | Work |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

Sometimes, of a spring evening, Papa would hear that distant honking that always makes his scalp tingle, and we would all rush out to see the geese, in lines of hundreds, steer up from the southwest, turn over the barn as over a landmark, and head into the north. Or on autumn nights of sudden cold that set the ewes breeding in the orchard, Papa would call you out of the house to stand with him in the now celebrated pumpkin patch and watch the northern lights flicker in electric clouds on the horizon, mount, die down, fade and mount again till they filled the whole northern sky with ghostly light in motion. Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know--the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More importantly, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe--that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and has been replaced by man's monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.

Age | Idealism | Religion |

Wilhelm Reich

If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible.

Church | Culture | Emotions | History | Marriage | Reason | Religion | Suppression | Time | Work |

Wilhelm Reich

The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality — both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.

Culture | Man | Morality | Time | Unity | Will | Work |

Wilhelm Reich

They call you "Little Man", "Common Man"; they say a new era has begun, the "Era of the Common Man". It isn't you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labor leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesman and philosophers. They give you your future but don't ask about your past.

Duty | Morality |