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

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know that you have come into the presence of fire - that it is best not uncautiously to touch that man - that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.

Courage | Life | Life | Men |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

Aptitude | Conscience | Contempt | Conversation | Freedom | Memory | Talent |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.

Cause | Humanity | Land | Life | Life | Unique |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case.

Church | Enough | Man |

William Shakespeare

An I thought he had been valiant and so cunning in fence, I 'ld have seen him damned ere I' ld have challenged him. Twelfth Night. Act iii. Sc. 4.

Church |

William Shakespeare

And if you can be merry then, I'll say a man may weep upon his wedding day.

Will |

William Shakespeare

Art thou officer, or art thou base, common, and popular?

Art | Chance | Life | Life | Art |

William Shakespeare

Ay, in the temple, in the town, the field, you do me mischief. Fie, Demetrius! Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex: we cannot fight for love, as men ay do; we should be woo'd, and were not made to woo. I'll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell, to die upon the hand I love so well. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act ii, Scene 1

Nature |

Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

Better | Faith | God | Good | Love | Time | Will | Work | God | Afraid | Learn |

William Godwin

Party has a more powerful tendency than perhaps any other circumstance in human affairs to render the mind quiescent and stationary. Instead of making each man an individual, which the interest of the whole requires, it resolves all understandings into one common mass, and subtracts from each the varieties that could alone distinguish him from a brute machine. Having learned the creed of our party, we have no longer any employment for those faculties which might lead us to detect its errors. We have arrived, in our own opinion, at the last page of the volume of truth; and all that remains is by some means to effect the adoption of our sentiments as the standard of right to the whole race of mankind.

Man |

William Law

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.

God | God |

William James

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.

Church | God | Good | Happy | Heart | Love | Prayer | Reality | Religion | Talking | Thought | God | Thought | Understand |

William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

Church | Consciousness | Dignity | Eternal | Little | Past | Salvation | Soul | Theology | Old |

William Law

A rule that relates even to the smallest part of our life is of great benefit to us, merely as it is a rule.

God | Providence | Revelation | God |

William Law

This useful, charitable, humble employment of yourselves is what I recommend to you with greatest earnestness, as being a substantial part of a wise and pious life.

Birth | God | Hell | Love | Nature | Nothing | Power | Spirit | Will | Wills | Work | God |

William James

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

Church | Growth | Heart | Rest | Tears | Trials |

Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned into something that Arthur didn’t entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you’d start the evolution of life off all over again.

Guests | History | Space | Time | Universe |

Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

Among these, the five organs of cognition are concerned with specific and non-specific objects. Speech is concerned with sound; the rest are concerned with all five objects.

Abundance | Order |

Edward Scribner Ames

We have overdeveloped the individualism that arose in a pioneer country. We are destined to become more co-operative, more collectivistic, and to find in this direction still greater opportunity for the individual, not so much restricted and defeated by competition but enlarged and enhanced by the support of a common will. It may be that the problem of material goods--of the necessary but yet external goods of food, clothing, shelter, and money-is about to be solved through new discoveries and developments, with the energies of men left freer than they have ever been to cultivate on higher levels the sharable goods of life, such as love and wisdom. These values grow with use and multiply by being freely shared.

Business | Church | Defiance | God | Isolation | Knowledge | Organic | Sense | Society | Society | Business | God | Old |

Egyptian Proverbs

At the time of a test, a person rises or falls.

Effort | Heaven | Hope | Knowledge |