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

Jeremy Collier

What can be more honorable than to have courage enough to execute the commands of reason and conscience, to maintain the dignity of our nature, and the station assigned us?

Character | Conscience | Courage | Dignity | Enough | Nature | Reason |

Sarah Ellis, fully Sarah Stickney Ellis

To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life.

Capacity | Character | Complacency | Credit | Friend | Life | Life |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Self-knowledge leading to self-hatred and humility, is the condition of the love and knowledge of God. Spiritual exercises that make use of distractions have this great merit, that they increase self-knowledge. Every soul that approaches God must be aware of who and what it is. To practice a form of mental or vocal prayer that is, so to speak, above one’s moral station is to act a lie: and the consequences of such lying are wrong notions about God, idolatrous worship of private and unrealistic phantasies and (for lack of the humility of self-knowledge) spiritual pride.

Character | Consequences | God | Humility | Knowledge | Love | Lying | Merit | Practice | Prayer | Pride | Self | Self-hatred | Self-knowledge | Soul | Worship | Wrong | God |

Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

"Every fault of the mind becomes more conspicuous and more guilty in proportion to the rank of the offender" - Persons in high station are not only answerable for their own conduct, but for the example they may hold out to others. This, joined to their advantages of education, aggravates their vices and loads them with a greater share of responsibility.

Character | Conduct | Education | Example | Fault | Mind | Rank | Responsibility | Fault | Guilty |

Thomas Jefferson

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Earth | Events | God | Government | Mankind | Men | Nature | People | Respect | Right | Wisdom | Government | Respect | God | Truths |

Samuel Smiles

It is not ease but effort, not facility, but difficulty, that makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved.

Difficulty | Effort | Life | Life | Men | Success | Wisdom |

Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

If the principles of contentment are not within us, the height of station and worldly grandeur will as soon add a cubit to a man's stature as to his happiness.

Contentment | Man | Principles | Will | Wisdom |

Anthony J. D'Angelo

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

Happiness |

Margaret Lee Runbeck

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

Happiness |

Abigail Adams

It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed… Great necessities call out great virtues.

Life | Life | Repose |

Channing Pollock

Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.

Little |

Joseph Addison

There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life.

Discretion | Impertinence | Learning | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Mind | Pedantry | Perfection | Prejudice | Qualities | Rest | Virtue | Virtue | Wants | Weakness | Will | Wit | Work | World | Talent | Value |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

Object |

Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

Nothing in this world is so good as usefulness. It binds your fellow-creatures to you, and you to them; it tends to the improvement of your own character; and it gives you a real importance in society, much beyond what any artificial station can bestow.

Character | Good | Improvement | Nothing | Society | Usefulness | World |

John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

Jeremy Collier

What can be more honorable than to have courage enough to execute the commands of reason and conscience,--to maintain the dignity of our nature, and the station assigned us?

Courage | Dignity | Enough | Reason |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Nothing exists for its own sake, nothing is valid by its own right. What seems to be a purpose is but a station on the road. All is set in the dimension of the holy. All is endowed with bearing on God.

Nothing | Purpose | Purpose |