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

William Cullen Bryant

The press, important as is its office, is but the servant of the human intellect, and its ministry is for good or for evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill which grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill he hopper with poisoned grain, and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

Character | Death | Evil | Good | Important | Office | Will | Wisdom |

Catherine Bowen, née Catherine Shober Drinker

The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all.

Courage | Ideals | Life | Life | Persistence | Shame | Success | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Words | Afraid |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'Tis all that I implore: In life and death a chainless soul, With courage to endure.

Courage | Death | Life | Life | Soul | Wisdom |

Thomas Buxton, fully Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet

The longer I live, the more I am certain that the difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, between the great and the insignificant, is energy - invincible determination - a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory.

Death | Determination | Energy | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The meaning of life cannot be separated from the meaning of death. Even the sun dies, so death is natural too. Only suffering must be appeased.

Death | Life | Life | Meaning | Suffering | Wisdom |

Samuel Butler

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

Death | History | Opinion | Public | Weakness | Wisdom | World |

Charlie Chaplin, formally Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin

Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels.

Beauty | Death | Nature | Omnipresence | Sadness | Wisdom |

Allan Chalmers, fully Allan Knight Chalmers

The only popularity worth aspiring after, is the popularity of the heart - the popularity that is won in the bosom of families, and at the side of death beds.

Death | Heart | Popularity | Wisdom | Worth |

Sarah Cirese

Knowing the reality and certainty of death reminds us that we do not have time to be casual or thoughtless with our lives. We only have time to live.

Death | Knowing | Reality | Time | Wisdom |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are creatures of despair.

Despair | Enough | Impulse | Man | Truth | Wisdom |

George B. Cortelyou, fully George Bruce Cortelyou

The greatest asset of any nation is the spirit of its people, and the greatest danger that can menace any nation is the breakdown of that spirit - the will to win and the courage to work.

Courage | Danger | People | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Work | Danger |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is good... to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ration; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Belief | Death | Fear | Good | Happy | Ignorance | Imagination | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | Organic | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

Monroe E. Deutsch, fully Monroe Emanuel Deutsch

Set the course of your life by the three stars - sincerity, courage and unselfishness. From these flow a host of other virtues. He who follows them will obtain the highest type of success, that which lies in the esteem of others.

Courage | Esteem | Life | Life | Sincerity | Success | Will | Wisdom |

Jeremy Collier

Despair is the offspring of fear; of laziness, and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and often of honesty too. I would not despair unless I saw my misfortune recorded in the book of fate; and signed and sealed by necessity.

Despair | Fate | Fear | Honesty | Impatience | Laziness | Misfortune | Necessity | Resolution | Spirit | Wisdom | Misfortune |

Babette Deutsch

The poets were among the first to realize the hollowness of a world in which love is made to seem as standardized as plumbing, and death is actually a mechanized industry.

Death | Industry | Love | Wisdom | World |