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

Philip Doddridge

He is the wisest and happiest man who, by constant attention of thought discovers the greatest opportunity of doing good, and breaks through every opposition that he may improve these opportunities.

Attention | Character | Good | Man | Opportunity | Opposition | Thought | Thought |

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known by pseudonymn Peter Parley

Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue and renders a man, in the pursuit or defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition in contempt.

Character | Consciousness | Contempt | Courage | Defense | Fear | Man | Opposition | Right | Virtue | Virtue |

Frank Harris

Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.

Character | Opposition | People |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship means contact, communion. There cannot be communion where people are divided by ideas. A belief may gather a group of people around itself. Such a group will inevitably breed opposition and so form another group with a different belief. Ideas postpone direct relationship with the problem.

Belief | Character | Ideas | Means | Opposition | People | Relationship | Will |

Yukteswar, fully Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, born Priyanath Karar NULL

Wrath springs from thwarted desires. I do not expect anything from others, so their actions cannot be in opposition to wishes of mind.

Character | Mind | Opposition | Wishes |

R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth

We are to live with life and die with death, not separated from them. The problem of suffering is insoluble, because we think of ourselves as apart from pain and death, in opposition to them. We can be free from change only by changing with it.

Change | Death | Life | Life | Opposition | Pain | Suffering | Wisdom | Think |

Walter Lippmann

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

Good | Indispensable | Opposition | Reason | Will | Wisdom | Wise |

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 |

Charles Williams

The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.

Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |

Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.

Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |

Christopher Henry Dawson

The great moral reformers have usually found the greatest opposition not in the “immoral” and impulsive individual, but in the regularly constituted organs of social authority and law.

Authority | Individual | Law | Opposition |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.

Opposition | Position |

Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Intelligence | Man | Opposition | Understand |

Damon Keith, fully Damon Jerome Keith

A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution.

Government | Opposition | Secrecy | Society | Society | Government |

Robert C. Savage, fully Robert Carlton Savage

You can measure a man by the opposition it takes to discourage him.

Man | Opposition |

Archibald Alexander Hodge

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition to stand up for it.

Enough | Men | Opposition | Truth | Wise |

Immanuel Kant

The beautiful is what pleases in the mere judgment (and therefore not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of the understanding). It follows at once from this that it must please apart from all interest. The sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense.

Judgment | Opposition | Sense | Understanding |

Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī

Without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue. You have to have courage – courage of different kinds: first, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up to that – no matter what comes in your way, no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is.

Courage | Mind | Opposition | Practice | Right | Virtue | Virtue | Obstacle |

Jean-Paul Sartre

Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.

Ideas | Opposition | Reflection |