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

Gustave Flaubert

It was for him that she had done it -- for this creature here, this man who understood nothing, who felt nothing.

Silence |

Hannah Arendt

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

Evil |

Hannah Arendt

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.

Evil | Good |

Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

Evil |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

No government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction... governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. It?s one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

Evil | Man | Pleasure | Understanding |

Hannah Whitall Smith

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor God by our faith.

Evil |

Hannah Arendt

Power corrupts... when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power... far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one.

Evil | Malice | Think |

Hannah Whitall Smith

Comfort and peace never come from anything we know about ourselves, but only and always from what we know about Him.

Justice |

Hannah Arendt

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

History | Price | Time |

Hannah Whitall Smith

God stirs up our comfortable nests, and pushes us over the edge of them, and we are forced to use our wings to save ourselves from fatal falling. Read your trials in this light, and see if your wings are being developed.

Justice |

Hannah Whitall Smith

To be a mother is the greatest vocation in the world. No being has a position of such great power and influence. She holds in her hands the destiny of nations, for to her is necessarily committed the making of the nation?s citizens.

Evil |

Italian Proverbs

Step by step one goes to Rome.

History |

Italian Proverbs

Not having enough is like not having anything.

God | God |

Italian Proverbs

No sooner is the law made than its evasion is discovered.

Evil | Men |

Italian Proverbs

That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

Dawn | Evolution | History | Individual | Life | Life | Sense | Survival | Truth |

Italian Proverbs

There is no helping him who will not be advised.

Enough | History | Justice | Time | Will |

Italian Proverbs

Too many chiefs, not enough warriors.

Absence | Atheism | History | Means | Prayer | Public | Research | Rule |

Italian Proverbs

When gold speaks every tongue is silent.

Evil | God | Hope | Justice | Will | World | God |

Italian Proverbs

There never was a shoe however handsome that did not become an ugly slipper.

Justice | System |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

Beginning | Change | Silence | Understand |