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

Leon Roth

Moral action is the meeting-place between the human and divine.

Action | Character |

Grady Poulard

The measure of a man is not determined by his show of outward strength or the volume of his voice or the thunder of his action. It is to be seen rather in terms of the strength of his inner self in terms of the nature and depth of his commitments the sincerity of his purpose and his willingness to continue "growing up."

Action | Character | Man | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Sincerity | Strength |

Publius Syrus

Suspicion breeds rivals for herself... The suspicious man condemns the good faith of all... Suspicion is an unspoken wrong to tested worth.

Character | Faith | Good | Man | Suspicion | Worth | Wrong |

Arthur Rimbaud, fully Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.”

Action | Character | Morality | Weakness |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.

Action | Character | Life | Life | Man | Serenity | Spirit |

William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.

Action | Character | Mind |

William Gilmore Simms

Better that we should err in action than wholly refuse to perform. The storm is so much better than the calm, as it declares the presence of a living principle. Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption also.

Action | Better | Character | Corruption | Death |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

Self-expression can be wrong as well as right... When self-expression is identified with irrational surrender to lower instincts, it ends by making the person a slave to those passions. Self-denial is not a renunciation of freedom; it is rather the taming of what is savage and base in our nature for what is higher and better. It is a release from imprisonment by our lusts and passions.

Better | Character | Ends | Freedom | Nature | Right | Self | Self-denial | Surrender | Wrong |

Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

The only true method of action in this world is to be in it, but not of it.

Action | Character | Method | World |