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

Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong - but time and chance happen to them all.

Battle | Chance | Race | Time | Wisdom |

Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

There is no more dangerous misconception than this which misconstrues the arms race as the cause rather than a symptom of the tensions and divisions which threaten nuclear war. If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament - disarmament follows peace.

Cause | History | Past | Peace | Race | War | Wisdom |

Charlotte Joko Beck

Our life is always absolute: that’s all there is. The truth is not somewhere else. But we have minds that are trying to burn the past or the future. The living present - Buddhahood - is rarely encountered.

Absolute | Future | Life | Life | Past | Present | Truth | Wisdom |

Babylonian Talmud

He who bears reproach without resentment escapes a thousand grievances.

Resentment | Wisdom |

Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place.

Eternal | Eternity | Events | Future | God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Past | Present | Reason | Time | Wisdom | God |

Jean de La Bruyère

Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us; they rejoice in the present.

Children | Future | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

If chance is defined as an event produced by random motion without any causal nexus, I would say there is no such thing as chance.

Chance | Wisdom |

Jean de La Bruyère

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

Children | Future | Past | Present | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

Age | History | Knowing | Men | Past | Present | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Books | God | Life | Life | Past | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

What is past is past. There is a future left to all men who have the virtue to repent, and the energy to atone.

Energy | Future | Men | Past | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the chance; and made chance the servitor.

Chance | Men | Wisdom |

Frank Gelett Burgess

If you wish to be positive, which means youthful, never speak of the past any more than you can help.

Means | Past | Wisdom |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

Future | Man | Mind | Past | Wisdom |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.

Civilization | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Benedetto Croce

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us.

Past | Wisdom |

Adam Clarke

It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent ore the cause of any event; but they signify merely men’s ignorance of the real and immediate cause.

Accident | Cause | Chance | Ignorance | Men | Nature | Reason | Wisdom | Words |

Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.

Chance | Trust | Wisdom |