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

Thomas Carlyle

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man,-a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes.-Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person, and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object-the wearing of clothes wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

Force | Important | Literature |

Thomas Carlyle

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

Force |

Thomas Carlyle

These limbs,--whence had we them, this stormy force; this life-blood, with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow--a shadow system gathered round our me; wherein through some moments or years, the divine essence is to be revealed in the flesh.

Force |

Thomas Carlyle

No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects.

Force | God | Grace | Judgment | Man | Soul | Will | God |

Thomas Carlyle

Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book.

Courage | Force | Influence | Mortal | Public | Will |

Thomas Chalmers

There is a set of people whom I cannot bear—the pinks of fashionable propriety,—whose every word is precise, and whose every movement is unexceptionable, but who, though versed in all the categories of polite behaviour, have not a particle of soul or cordiality about them. We allow that their manners may be abundantly correct. There may be eloquence in every gesture, and gracefulness in every position; not a smile out of place, and not a step that would not bear the measurement of the severest scrutiny. This is all very fine: but what I want is the heart and gaiety of social intercourse; the frankness that spreads ease and animation around it; the eye that speaks affability to all, that chases timidity from every bosom, and tells every man in the company to be confident and happy. This is what I conceive to be the virtue of the text, and not the sickening formality of those who walk by rule, and would reduce the whole of human life to a wire-bound system of misery and constraint.

Achievement | Conquest | Deeds | Desire | Emotions | Force | Indulgence | Opposition | Power | Resolution | Virtue | Virtue | Worth | Deeds |

Thomas Carlyle

The chambers of the East are opened in every land, and the sun come forth to sow the earth with orient pearl. Night, the ancient mother, follows him with her diadem of stars. * * * Bright creatures! how they gleam like spirits through the shadows of innumerable eyes from their thrones in the boundless depths of heaven.

Force | Insight | Law | Nature | Perfection | Will | Circumstance | Intellect | Understand |

Thomas Carlyle

Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.

Force | Memory |

Thomas Carlyle

When words leave off, music begins.

Force | Hope | Rule | Soul |

Thomas Hobbes

Why any man should take the law of his country rather than his own Inspiration, for the rule of his action.

Force | Meaning | Principles |

Thomas Hobbes

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Crime | Error | Force |

Thomas Hood

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, that we too may leave behind us —Letters that we ought to burn.

Day | Force | Love | Man | Men |

Thomas Jefferson

I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.

Force | Government | Law | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

Change | Credit | Giving | Good | Man | Manners | Money | Nothing | Prison | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

Force | Government | History | Power | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

Conduct | Force | Freedom | Reason | Silence |

Thomas Hughes

One's own—what a charm there is in the words! how long it takes boy and man to find out their worth! how fast most of us hold on to them! faster and more jealously, the nearer we are to the general home into which we can take nothing, but must go naked as we came into the world. When shall we learn that he who multiplieth possessions, multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be his who hath need of them?

Force | Woman |

Thomas Jefferson

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.

Circumstances | Force | Government | Man | Property | Right | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

Church | Corruption | Force | Freedom of religion | Freedom | Government | Important | People | Power | Religion | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

The foundation on which all [our State constitutions] are built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every pre-eminence but that annexed to legal office and particularly the denial of apre-eminence by birth.

Agitation | Force | Opinion | Public |