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

Elizabeth Gilbert

Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.

Honor | Ideas | Life | Life | Society | Society |

Elizabeth Gilbert

To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you make. It has very little thing to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

Enjoyment | Means | Rhetoric |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Men say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns.

Church | Government | Men | Office | Public | Will | Government |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.

Church | Regard | Woman |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

On the whole, there is nobody like one's own mother... I wonder if, after all, mothers are not the best friends there are!

Boys | Heart | Thought | Child | Thought |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

Action | Argument | Association | Church | Consideration | Convention | God | Hope | Nature | Will | Woman | Association | God |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.

Church | Sense |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

The Divine of the Lord in heaven is love, for the reason that love is receptive of all things of heaven, such as peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness.

Charity | Church | Good | Lord |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

If you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. And likewise, if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.

God | Soul | God |

Emile Zola

Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her along to the bitter end of the miserable existence she'd made for herself. They never even knew what she did die of. Some spoke of a chill. But the truth was that she died from poverty, from the filth and the weariness of her wretched life.

Church | Perfection | Will |

Emile Zola

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

Nothing |

Emile Zola

As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting.

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

Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine -- If he love with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him -- Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse -- It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love in him what he has not?

Church | Purpose | Purpose |

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

The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity.

Church | Darkness | Old |

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

It's scary! Single - person means so much and so many different things!

Church | Heart | Rest | Will |

Emma Goldman

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

Authority | Church | Nothing | Self-denial |

English Proverbs

Don't meet troubles half-way.

English Proverbs

Never offer to teach fish to swim.

Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

But what does he do to qualify as a sonovabitch? Jenny asked. Make me, I replied. Beg pardon? Make me, I repeated. Her eyes widened like saucers. You mean like incest? she asked. Don’t give me your family problems, Jen. I have enough of my own. Like what, Oliver? she asked, like just what is it he makes you do? The ‘right things’, I said. What’s wrong with the ‘right things’? she asked, delighting in the apparent paradox.

Failure | Life | Life | Failure | Happiness |

Evan Grant

Everything gives out some kind of data, whether it's sound or smell or vibration