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

Claude M. Bristol

Always try to do something for the other fellow and you will be agreeably surprised how things come your way - how many pleasing things are done for you.

Will | Wisdom |

Ernest Leroy Boyer

Our obsession with test scores has produced distorted curriculum, teaching, and educational policy. As long as it continues, we will get the dual phenomena of rising test scores and too many illiterate and enumerate citizens.

Obsession | Phenomena | Policy | Will | Wisdom |

Charles R. Brown

We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living.

People | Wisdom | Work |

Jean de La Bruyère

In the world there are only two ways of raising one’s self, either by one’s own industry or by the weakness of others.

Industry | Self | Weakness | Wisdom | World |

Jean de La Bruyère

There are but two ways of rising in the world: either by one’s own industry or profiting by the foolishness of others.

Industry | Wisdom | World |

Phillips Brooks

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is

Action | Desire | Right | Spirit | Wisdom |

Brown v. Board of Education NULL

Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

Awakening | Citizenship | Education | Good | Important | Life | Life | Opportunity | Public | Right | Service | Society | Training | Wisdom | Child |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism!

Aphorism | Life | Life | Reason | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.

Benevolence | Fraud | Good | Knowledge | Little | Mankind | Wisdom | World | Friendship | Forgive | Learn |

Brown v. Board of Education NULL

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Doctrine | Education | Public | Reason | Wisdom |

Horace Bushnell

The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm.

Dignity | Discovery | Duty | Experience | God | Humility | Liberty | Life | Life | Obligation | Repentance | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Teach | Truth | Will | Wisdom | God |

Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one is miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and commend it in their precepts.

Adversity | Happy | Prosperity | Wisdom |

Ora Capelli

Joy is indeed a precious quality which very few experience in their lives. The person who knows how to enjoy life will never grow old no matter how many years he can call his own. It is easy to be happy at specific times, but there is a certain art in being happy and contented every day.

Art | Day | Experience | Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Will | Wisdom | Art | Old |

Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

Idleness is the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active; and if it be not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.

Body | Business | Cause | Devil | Idleness | Melancholy | Mind | 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 |

Lynn Caine

Bereavement is a wound. It's like being very, very badly hurt... You will grieve and that is painful. And your grief will have many stages, but all of them will be healing. Little by little, you will be whole again. And you will be a stronger person. Just as a broken bone knits and becomes stronger than before, so will you.

Bereavement | Grief | Little | Will | Wisdom |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

At the bottom of a good deal of bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.

Bravery | Cowardice | Good | Men | Opinion | Public | Will | Wisdom | World |

Samuel Butler

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Learning | Life | Life | Public | Wisdom |