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

James Boswell

A gentleman who had been very unhappy I marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

Character | Experience | Hope | Marriage | Wife |

Jean de La Bruyère

We hope to grow old, and yet we fear old age; that is, we are willing to live, and afraid to die.

Age | Character | Fear | Hope | Old age | Afraid | Old |

William Blake

The voice of the Devil. All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors: 1. That man has two real existing principles; vis; a body and a soul. 2. That energy, called evil, is alone from body, and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul. 3. That God will torment man in eternity for the following energies. But the following contraries to these are true: 1. Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of the soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is bound or outward circumference of energy. 3. Energy is eternal delight.

Age | Body | Character | Devil | Energy | Eternal | Eternity | Evil | God | Good | Life | Life | Man | Principles | Reason | Sacred | Soul | Will | Following | God |

R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth

We walk, and our religion is shown (even in the dullest and most insensitive person) in how we walk. Or to put it more accurately, living in this world means choosing, choosing to walk, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself. Nothing can disguise it. The walk of an ordinary man and of an enlightened man are as different as that of a snake and a giraffe.

Character | Disguise | Man | Means | Nothing | Religion | World |

Susan Fenimore Cooper, fully Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accidents than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Character | Events | History | Reason | Wisdom |

J. J. de Chenier

What is virtue? Reason in practice.

Character | Practice | Reason | Virtue | Virtue |

Jeremy Collier

What can be more honorable than to have courage enough to execute the commands of reason and conscience, to maintain the dignity of our nature, and the station assigned us?

Character | Conscience | Courage | Dignity | Enough | Nature | Reason |

Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil; our great hope lies in developing what is good.

Character | Evil | Good | Hope | Little | Progress |

Moncure Daniel Conway

All religion and all ethics are summed up in justice.

Character | Ethics | Justice | Religion | Wisdom |

James Fenimore Cooper

A true history of human events would show a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Accident | Character | Events | History | Reason |

Jeremy Collier

There are few things reason can discover with so much certainty and ease as its own insufficiency.

Character | Reason | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

The great duty of God’s children is to love one another. This duty on earth takes the name and form of the law of humanity. We are to recognize all men as brethren, no matter where born, or under what sky, or institution or religion they may live. Every man belongs to the race, and owes a duty to mankind... Men cannot, by combining themselves into narrower or larger societies, sever the sacred, blessed bond which joins them to their kind... The law of humanity must reign; over the assertion of all human rights.

Assertion | Character | Children | Duty | Earth | God | Humanity | Law | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Race | Religion | Rights | Sacred | Blessed |

William Congreve

Thought precedes the will to think, and error lives ere reason can be born. Reason, the power to guess at right and wrong, the twinkling lamp of wand'ring life, that winks and wakes by turns fooling the follower 'twixt shade and shining.

Character | Error | Power | Reason | Right | Thought | Will | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

The great hope of society is in individual character.

Character | Hope | Individual | Society | Wisdom | Society |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The reason angels can fly is that they take themselves so lightly.

Angels | Character | Reason |

William Ellery Channing

A religion giving dark views of God, and infusing superstitious fear of innocent enjoyment, instead of aiding sober habits, will, by making men abject and sad, impair their moral force and prepare them for intemperance as a refuge from depression or despair.

Character | Depression | Despair | Enjoyment | Fear | Force | Giving | God | Intemperance | Men | Religion | Will |