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

Eugenio Montale

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

Euripedes NULL

Old menÂ’s prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them.

Heart | Love |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I can never understand how two men can write a book together; to me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

Aesthetic | Crime | Desire |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying I must read that, too, when I've the time, replace it and continue the search.

Beauty | Change | Heart | Sadness | Beauty |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

Change | Heart | Sadness |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

Curiosity | Heart | Love | Search |

Evelyn Underhill

When you let intuition have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most practical of all activities.

Charity | Desire | Events | God | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Reality | God |

Evelyn Scott, also wrote under pseudonyms Ernest Souza and Elsie Dunn

The moon... is a mad woman holding up her dress so that her white belly shines. Haughty, impregnable, ridiculous, silent and white as a debauched queen.

Day |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

Heart |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Old boy, said Grimes, you're in love. Nonsense! Smitten? said Grimes. No, no. The tender passion? No. Cupid's jolly little darts? No. Spring fancies, love's young dream? Nonsense! Not even a quickening of the pulse? No. A sweet despair? Certainly not. A trembling hope? No. A frisson? a Je ne sais quoi? Nothing of the sort. Liar! said Grimes.

Journey | Mind |

Eustace Budgell

The fair sex are so conscious to themselves that they have nothing in them which can deserve entirely to engross the whole man, that they heartily despise one who, to use their own expression, is always hanging at their apron-strings.

Friend | Man |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Oh, why did nobody warn me? cried Grimes in agony. I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.

Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie

There's still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that's still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Day | Heart | Music | Present |

Evan Esar

Some go on a diet while most are merely wishful shrinkers.

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine--as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together--and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended. Just the place to bury a crock of gold, said Sebastian. I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Reading |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored

Books | Duty |

Ezra Taft Benson

Jefferson warned that we should not talk about confidence in men but that we should inhibit their power through the Constitution.

Blessings | Freedom | Opportunity | World |