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

Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL

Who ever lives looking for pleasure only, his senses uncontrolled, immoderate in his enjoyments, idle and weak, the tempter will certainly overcome him, as the wind blows down a weak tree.

Character | Pleasure | Will |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Deliverance is out of time into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a “state of grace.” All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

Character | Docility | Eternal | Eternity | Existence | Free will | Grace | Nature | Obedience | Order | Power | Reality | Self | Spirit | Time | Will |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

No wind favors him who [addresses his voyage to no certain port] has no destined port.

Character |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

When fate is adverse, a wise man can always strive for happiness and sail against the wind to attain it.

Character | Fate | Man | Wise | Fate | Happiness |

Benjamin Waugh

To attempt to resist temptation, to abandon our bad habits, and to control our dominant passions in our own unaided strength, is like attempting to check by a spider’s thread the progress of as ship of the first rate, borne along before wind and tide.

Character | Control | Progress | Strength | Temptation |

Christian Nestell Bovee

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.

Circumstances | Influence | Wisdom |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

Melancholy | Reality | Remorse | Wisdom |

William Matthews

Solitary reading will enable a man to stuff himself with information, but without conversation, his mind will become like a pond without an outlet - a mass of unhealthy stagnature. It is not enough to harvest knowledge by study; the wind of talk must winnow it, and blow away the chaff; then will the clear, bright grains of wisdom be garnered, for our own use or that of others.

Conversation | Enough | Knowledge | Man | Mind | Reading | Study | Will | Wisdom |

John Neal

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition.

Better | Man | Opposition | Wisdom |

Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler

Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.

Absence | Death | Nothing | Sound | Time | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.

Nothing | System | Wisdom |

William Winter

No life can be barren which hears the whisper of the wind in the branches, or the voice of the sea as it breaks upon the shore; and no soul can lack happiness looking up to the midnight stars.

Life | Life | Soul | Wisdom | Happiness |

William James

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right.

Habit | Life | Life | Means | Right | System | Training | Will |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Heaven | World |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it -- but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Experience | Insight | Life | Life | Worth |