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

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness.

Giving | Humanity | Life | Life | Man | Superiority |

Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.

Distrust | Love | Woman | Old |

William Cartwright

Love makes those young whom age doth chill, and whom he finds young keeps young still.

Soul | Thinking | Thought | Thought |

William Cowper

Philologists who chase a panting syllable through time and space, start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, to Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Good | Little | Mind | Time | Will | Old | Think |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

It’s not debt per say that overwhelms an individual corporation or country. Rather it is a continuous increase in debt in relation to income that causes trouble.

Little | Old |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

The mass and majesty of this world, all that carries weight and always weighs the same lay in the hands of others; they were small and could not hope for help and no help came: what their foes like to do was done, their shame was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride and died as men before their bodies died.

Heart | Imagination | Indignity | Think |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.

Art | Beauty | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Price | Science | Art | Beauty |

Wallace Stevens

If the hero is not a person, the emblem of him, even if xenophon, seems to stand taller than a person stands, has a wider brow, large and less human eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body of a primitive.

Good | People |

Wallace Stevens

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire

We wanted to step off our island and add the color of the third world. We got gold cigarette paper and stuck it around our teeth. We really did look like pirates and dressed to look the part.

Torture |

Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire

I was still interested in the youth rebellion but never-the-less I stopped being a victim. Stopped trying to attack the establishment realizing that it takes too much of your energy.

Nothing | Thought | Thought |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

Power | World |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

It is nothing but a kind of a micro-cosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

Philosophers never stood in need of Homer or the Pharisees to be convinced that everything is done by immutable laws; that everything is settled; that everything is the necessary effect of some previous cause.

Earth | Nothing | Order | Religion | Sacrifice | Work | Youth | Youth |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

And I is high tide. Swell. He arches his back. I feel a fresh miss that cableaz? that proud steed that rider hits him with spurs and Harness it then. You, that I wear on his back, tell me what enemy is the one who came to see us, while our rings clatter on the pavement? 's Death. Death is the enemy. I can run against her spear lying down, with long hair flying behind me like tresses of a young man as you gallop Percival's tresses in India. Stick spurs into the horse's ribs. Unbridled and ruthless, I can run against you, Death! waves crashing to shore.

Ambiguity | Ignorance | Mind | Time | Wonder |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

Existence | Receive | Superiority |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for ever chaunts. If a boot creaks, it's awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy are the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in and out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and organ. Forever requiem—repose.