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

Charles W. Eliot

Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarded who sees within the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to overcome.

Evil | Hope | Life | Life | Right | Wisdom | Wrong |

Tyron Edwards

Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past - the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receives.

Evidence | Future | Past | Regret | Right | Wisdom | World | Wrong |

Lewis Dilwyn, fully Monsignor Dilwyn W Lewis

One watch set right will do to set many by; one that goes wrong may be the means of misleading a whole neighborhood; and the same may be said of example.

Example | Means | Right | Will | Wisdom | Wrong |

Euripedes NULL

Better to die in action than sitting still.

Action | Better | Wisdom |

Henry Ford

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Capital punishment | Charity | Crime | Poverty | Punishment | Wisdom | Wrong |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Religion is action not diction.

Action | Religion | Wisdom |

Henry Ford

Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind. Thinking without constructive action becomes a disease.

Action | Disease | Idleness | Mind | Thinking | Wisdom | Work | Think |

Hermetica NULL

God then, is the source of all things; the Aeon is the power of God; and the work of the Aeon is the Kosmos which never came into being, but is ever coming into being, by the action of the Aeon, and that which olds the universe together is the Aeon.

Action | God | Power | Universe | Wisdom | Work |

Edward Howard Griggs

We crave freedom, but freedom is never an end in itself; it is a means to be used for further aims. Its value lies in the extent to which it can assist the development of life. To possess freedom with no life for which to use it is but the bitterest farce. Life never means complete freedom, and every action and relation is an added bond. Life is to be attained, not through a non-moral freedom of caprice, but through a glad welcoming and loyal fulfillment of every bond and obligation which comes in the daily path of life.

Action | Aims | Freedom | Fulfillment | Life | Life | Means | Obligation | Wisdom | Value |

Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

When a man is wrong and won't admit is, he always gets angry.

Man | Wisdom | Wrong |

Heinrich Heine

The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Action | Men | Thought | Wisdom |

Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman

It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much.

Business | Capitalism | Crime | Government | Individual | Judgment | Wisdom | Wrong | Government | Value |

Thomas Hughes

If we look abroad upon the great multitude of mankind, and endeavor to trace out the principles of action in every individual, it will, I think, seem highly probably that ambition runs through the whole species, and that every man, in proportion to the vigor of his complexion, is more or less actuated by it.

Action | Ambition | Individual | Man | Mankind | Principles | Will | Wisdom | Ambition |

David Hume

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior.

Action | Behavior | Circumstances | History | Human nature | Mankind | Men | Nature | Nothing | Principles | Wisdom |