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

Eleanor Holmes Norton

We have trivialized this park, residents make too little use of it, and tourists don't know where it is, ... Neither the city or the federal government has bothered to make maximum use of it. The problem is that it had no plan and it's in a state of great deterioration.

Fate | People | Right | Fate |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Therefore to this dog will I, tenderly not scornfully, render praise and favor: with my hand upon his head, is my benediction said therefore and forever.

Laughter | Tears |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

Famous |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Women know the way to rear up children (to be just); they know a simple, merry, tender knack of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, and stringing pretty words that make no sense, and kissing full sense into empty words; which things are corals to cut life upon, although such trifles.

Laughter | Tears |

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate; As the voyage along thru life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife.

Conscience | Earth | Good | Happy | Labor | Laughter | Man | People | Wealth | Will | Worry |

Dorothy Parker

Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

Better | Hope | Laughter |

Emile Zola

And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!

Children | Eternity |

Émile Souvestre

Did not think the world was so great.

Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Those who are beloved cannot die, because love means immortality.

Ability | Laughter | Quiet |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ''Checkout Time is 18 years.''

Laughter | Life | Life | Thinking |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

Comedy | Humor | Laughter | Pain |

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 |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.

Revolution | Right | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.

Defeat | Imperialism | Struggle |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Valdivia's actions symbolize man's indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority. That phrase, attributed to Caesar, proclaiming he would rather be first-in-command in some humble Alpine village than second-in-command in Rome, is repeated less pompously, but no less effectively, in the epic campaign that is the conquest of Chile. If, in the moment the conquistador was facing death at the hands of that invincible Araucanian Caupolican, he had not been overwhelmed with fury, like a hunted animal, I do not doubt that judging his life, Valdivia would have felt death was fully justified. He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural, and he had become the omnipotent ruler of a warrior nation.

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves… The stages of human development are to strive for Possession (Artha), Knowledge (Dharma), Ability (Kama), Being (Moksha)… Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge. It has nothing to do with individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further – when man dies his karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.

Defeat | Hope |

Eudora Welty

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Office |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Time |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Change | Defeat | Future | Life | Life | Nothing | Present | Child |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Perhaps all our lovers are merely hints and symbols; vagabond languages scrawled on gate-posts and paving stones along the weary road that others have trampled before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond each other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

Day | Glory | Laughter | Men | Quiet |