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

Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents... It is a place where the city of man services not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

Beauty | Body | Commerce | Desire | Goals | Hunger | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Society | Wisdom | Society | Commerce | Beauty | Child |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Let life teach you what spirit it... By conforming to spiritual ideals imposed from the outside through the force of tradition, people often channel themselves into models of behavior that violate their inner essence. We are all guaranteed realization when we strip away our pre-conceived notions about spiritual perfection, give up striving form some idealized end-point called 'enlightenment,' and discover the magnificence of what we already are and live that fully.

Behavior | Enlightenment | Force | Ideals | Life | Life | People | Perfection | Spirit | Teach | Tradition | Wisdom |

Paul Mairet

Not sixteen per cent of the human race is, or ever has been, engaged in any of the kinds of activity at which they excel.

Human race | Race | Wisdom |

Robert S. MacArthur

Men seldom die of hard work; activity is God's medicine. The highest genius is willingness and ability to do hard work. Any other conception of genius makes it a doubtful, if not a dangerous possession.

Ability | Genius | God | Men | Wisdom | Work |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Life | Life | Man | People | Wisdom |

V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

Genius | Greed | Mind | Wisdom |

Matthew B Ridgway, fully Matthew Bunker Ridgway

In setting our military goals we need first of all to recognize that most of the world’s most basic woes do not lend themselves to purely military solutions.

Goals | Need | Wisdom | World |

Denise Taylor

To be present with the sensations in our body is not an act of will. It is a kind of equanimity or grace. In such movements we feel our activity belonging to life.

Body | Equanimity | Grace | Life | Life | Present | Will | Wisdom |

Daniel Amen

New research suggests that the brain influences, and may, in fact, be wired to experience God or deep spirituality. Religious experience often stems from temporal-lobe and limbic system function,, and obsessions (religious and others) stem from too much activity in the anterior cingulated gyrus and basal ganglia.

Experience | God | Research | Spirituality | System | God |

Edwin Percy Whipple

No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

Education | Growth | Mind | Thought | Wisdom |

Julian Baggini

A goal-oriented life locates the purposed of life in the achievement of a goal, which is necessarily tied to a discrete moment in time… But we also exist across time, and when our life’s goals are fixed so narrowly on moments that are only briefly the present, we fail to do justice to the enduring aspect of human life… Moments slip away and so if life’s purpose is tied to moments. Although moments can play a part, in order to find a purpose which is truly fulfilling, we also need to find a way of living which is worthwhile in itself. Life is rarely an undiluted pleasure that our own attitudes are themselves important to our sense of well-being.

Achievement | Goals | Important | Justice | Life | Life | Need | Order | Play | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Time |

Edwin Percy Whipple

Man, being essentially active, must find in activity his joy, as well as his beauty and glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.

Beauty | Glory | Good | Joy | Labor | Man | Reward | Wisdom | Beauty |

Yellow Emperor's Canon of Internal Medicine NULL

To administer medicine to diseases which have already developed and thereby suppress bodily chaos which has already occurred is comparable to the behavior of those who would begin to dig a well after they have grown thirsty, or those who would begin to cast weapons after they have engaged in battle.

Battle | Behavior | Weapons | Wisdom |

Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, simply known as Ali NULL

A man’s behavior is the index of the man, and his discourse is the index of his understanding.

Behavior | Man | Understanding |

Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

We are capable of finding unending meaning in a world of constant, shimmering, sometimes threatening change. The task is to keep the question of life in question, and to find in it an unending source of joy and possibility, even in the darkest of times. It is within the constant overcoming of our own limitations and habits, and of the established views of our age, that passive happiness and unreflective contentment are lost, then to be replaced by joyful activity and a glimpse of a broader, more enriching, and more responsible awareness than we have been capable of before.

Age | Awareness | Change | Contentment | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Question | World | Awareness | Happiness |