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

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

What I admire in Columbus is not having discovered a world, but his having gone to search for it on the faith of an opinion.

Character | Faith | Opinion | Search | World |

Kenneth Eldon Bailey

Doubt is an incentive to search for truth, and patient inquiry leads the way to it.

Doubt | Inquiry | Search | Truth | Wisdom |

Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

Age | Enough | Family | Father | Isolation | Mother | Nature | People | Security | Wisdom | World |

Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough

The happy gift of being agreeable seems to consist not in one, but in an assemblage of talents tending to communicate delight; and how many are there, who, by easy manners, sweetness of temper, and a variety of other undefinable qualities, possess the power of pleasing without any visible effort, without the aids of wit, wisdom, or learning, nay, as it should seem in their defiance; and this without appearing even to know that they possess it.

Defiance | Effort | Happy | Learning | Manners | Power | Qualities | Temper | Wisdom | Wit |

John Cudahy, fully John Clarence Cudahy

If these distracted times prove anything, they prove that the greatest illusion is reliance upon the security and permanence of material possessions. We must search for some other coin. And we will discover that the treasure-house of education has stood intact and unshaken in the storm. The man of cultivated life has founded his house upon a rock. You can never take away the magnificent mansion of his mind.

Education | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Possessions | Search | Security | Will | Wisdom |

Thomas Dreier

That person lives in hell who gets what he desires too soon. Whether he finds his happiness in wealth, power, fame or women, or in a combination of all, that happiness will be meaningless if it robs him of his desire. Heaven is a country through which we are permitted to search eagerly and with hope for what we want.

Desire | Fame | Heaven | Hell | Hope | Power | Search | Wealth | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |

Jerry Falwell

No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”

Eternal | Eternity | Existence | Fulfillment | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Longing | Man | Meaning | Order | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Relationship | Right | Search | Time | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Woman | God |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the later lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.

Error | Search | Truth | Wisdom |

David Hume

Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

Care | Children | Discernment | Little | Nature | Nothing | Universe | Wisdom | Worth |

Ta-chu Hui-Hai

When you stop thinking that things have a past or future, and that they come or go, then in the whole universe there won't be a single atom that is not your own treasure. All you have to do is look into your own mind; then the marvelous reality will manifest itself at all times. Don't search for the truth with your intellect. Don't search at all. The nature of the mind is intrinsically pure.

Future | Mind | Nature | Past | Reality | Search | Thinking | Truth | Universe | Will | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

They change their sky not their mind who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.

Change | Happy | Idleness | Life | Life | Mind | Object | Present | Search | Wisdom |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

We live in a hemisphere whose own revolution has given birth to the most powerful force of the modern age - the search for the freedom and self-fulfillment of man.

Age | Birth | Force | Freedom | Fulfillment | Man | Revolution | Search | Self | Wisdom |

D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

The more we search for an alibi, the more we discover that unhappiness on earth is man-made.

Earth | Man | Search | Unhappiness | Wisdom |

John Locke

Wit lying most in the assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity.

Ideas | Lying | Wisdom | Wit |

Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

To look fearlessly upon life; to accept the laws of nature, not with meek resignation, but as her sons, who dare to search and question; to have peace and confidence within our souls - these are the beliefs that make for happiness.

Confidence | Life | Life | Nature | Peace | Question | Resignation | Search | Wisdom |