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

Hans Hoffman

A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.

Better | Learning |

Hans Rosling

You have to fit in sometimes to make people comfortable to listen to you.

Good | Life | Life |

Hannah Arendt

The possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.

Need |

Hans Hoffman

The relative meaning of two physical facts in a emotionally controlled relation always creates the phenomenon of a third fact of a higher order, just as two musical sounds, heard simultaneously create the phenomenon of a third, fourth or fifth. The nature of this higher third is non-physical. In a sense it is magic. Each such phenomenon always overshadows the material qualities and the limited meaning of the basic factors from which it has sprung. For this reason Art expresses the highest quality of the spirit when it is surreal in nature; or, in terms of the visual arts, when it is of a surreal plastic nature.

Need | Friends |

Italian Proverbs

One who wants to keep their yard tidy does not reserve a plot for the weeds.

Change | Civilization | Future | Global | Health | Inconvenient | Land | Security | Will |

Italian Proverbs

No book was so bad, but some good might be got out of it.

Need |

Italian Proverbs

One who speaks fair words feeds you with an empty spoon.

Attention | Change | Conversation | Global | Land | Need |

Italian Proverbs

Of this world each man has as much as he takes.

Life | Life | Men |

Italian Proverbs

The eye of the master fattens the horse.

Experience | Life | Life | Principles | Psychology | Time | Youth | Youth |

Italian Proverbs

Tell me the company you keep, and I will tell you who you are.

Need |

Italian Proverbs

Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Peace | Happiness |

Italian Proverbs

One good morsel and a hundred vexations.

Mind | Need | People |

Italian Proverbs

Much smoke, and little roast.

Life | Life | Television | World | Understand |

Italian Proverbs

One must have been controlled in the same situation one wishes to properly control others.

Change | People | World | Think |

Italian Proverbs

Plenty of words when the cause is lost.

Change |

Italian Proverbs

Not all truths are proper to be told.

Life | Life |

Italian Proverbs

Much water passes by the mill that the miller perceives not.

Need | War |

Italian Proverbs

One enemy is too many and a hundred friends aren't enough.

Learning | Need | Will | Teacher |

Italian Proverbs

That that comes of a cat will catch mice.

Day | Faith | Reality | Reason | Will | World |

Italian Proverbs

The best way to conquer or control a group of people is by encouraging them to fight among themselves rather than allowing them to unite in opposition to the ruling authority.

Life | Life |