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

Ernest Becker

The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Balance | Illusion | Immortality | Man | People | Truth | World | Trouble |

Ernest Becker

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.

Guilt | Knowledge | Right | Story | Writing |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends. 'The fish is my friend too,' he said aloud. 'I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

Good | Little | Man | Men | People | Sound | Talking | Time | Waiting |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Say, there's plenty of Americans on this train. They've got seven cars of them from Dayton, Ohio.

Absolute | Appearance | Danger | Death | Little | Order | Purity | Danger | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

Cruelty | Day | Important | Learning | Light | Man | Occupation | People | Sacrifice | Will | Cruelty | Value |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war and a real peasant leader might be a little too much like Pablo. You couldn't wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manifacture one. At that, from what he had seen of Campesino, with his black beard, his thick negroid lips, and his feverish, staring eyes, he thought he might give almost as much trouble as a real peasant leader. The last time he had seen him he seemed to have gotten to believe his own publicity and think he was a peasant.

Absolute | Brotherhood | Consecration | Death | Duty | Experience | Light | Necessity | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Talking | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

Better | Courage | Good | Kill | Light | Loneliness | Love | Man | People | Time | Will | Wishes | World | Afraid |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Alchemy | Beginning | Doubt | Enough | Good | Loneliness | Man | Public | Will | Work |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a very merry one.

Enough | Happy | Life | Life | Praise | Rest | Value |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Ability | Death | Despise | Harm | Necessity | Responsibility | Talent |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Men | Time |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The common origin of man and the other mammals from a single ancient stem-form can no longer be questioned; nor can the immediate blood-relationship of man and the ape.

Action | Character | Heredity |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

These two branches of our science--on the one side ontogeny or embryology, and on the other phylogeny, or the science of race-evolution--are most vitally connected. The one cannot be understood without the other.

Life | Life | Little | Value |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions.

Dependence | Economics | Existence | Man | Means | Value |

Erving Goffman

The issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

But few besides medical men are aware that MAN, in the course of his individual formation, passes through a series of transformations which are not less surprising and wonderful than the familiar metamorphoses of the butterfly.

Action | Heredity |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others. It is not only unjust but also an irrational element which distorts all relationships within the enterprise.

Action | Fear | Knowledge | Little | Man | Men | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Our universities produced lawyers and doctors for the old social system, but did not create enough agricultural extension teachers, agronomists, chemists, or physicists. In fact, we do not even have mathematicians.

Action | Battle | Death | Enemy | Men | Unity | War |