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

Robert Half

Planning for happiness is rarely successful. Happiness just happens.

Wisdom | Happiness |

Edward Howard Griggs

Peace among nations, like happiness for the individual, is not an end, but a by-product that usually comes when you live right.

Individual | Nations | Peace | Right | Wisdom | Happiness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

True happiness springs from moderation.

Moderation | Wisdom | Happiness |

Arthur Sherburne Hardy

Set happiness before you as an end, no matter in what guise of wealth, or fame, or oblivion even, and you will not attain it. But renounce it and seek the pleasure of God, and that instant is the birth of you own.

Birth | Fame | God | Oblivion | Pleasure | Wealth | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |

John Oliver Hobbes, Pseud. for Mrs. Pearlmary-Teresa Craigie

Why should we refuse the happiness this hour gives us, because some other hour might take it away?

Wisdom | Happiness |

David Hume

Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.

Determination | Mind | Necessity | Nothing | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?

Pain | Riches | Sorrow | Suffering | Wisdom | Loss | Trouble |

Raymond Holliwell

Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of it causes the least to take on the magnitude of complexity.

Simplicity | Understanding | Wisdom |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Education | Learning | Wisdom |

Victor Hugo

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or, more correctly, being loved in spite of yourself.

Life | Life | Wisdom | Happiness |

David Hume

Notwithstanding the empire of the imagination, there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other... These principles of association are reduced to three, viz. Resemblance... Contiguity... Causation... as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are only ties of our thought, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them.

Appearance | Association | Ideas | Imagination | Means | Mind | Principles | Thought | Universe | Wisdom | Association | Thought |

William James

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Men | Wisdom | Happiness |