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

Edwin Percy Whipple

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

Earth | Thought | Words | Thought |

Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

The primary dispositions are innate; the acquired ones, like virtue and the rest, depend on the instruments. The uterine germ and the rest belong to the effect.

Action |

Sei Shōnagon

When crossing a river in bright moonlight, I love to see the water scatter in showers of crystal under the oxen's feet.

Speech | Wants | Woman |

Edwin Percy Whipple

The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

Action | Greatness |

Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

Thought | Wise | Thought |

Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

Like the visible means, the revealed mode is also tainted, destructive and excessive. Different from these and superior is that method consisting in discriminative knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest and the knower.

Action | Nature | People |

Edwin Percy Whipple

A person with a bad name is already half hanged, saith the old proverb.

Study | Thought | Thought |

Edwin Percy Whipple

God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.

Action | Good | Thought | Thought |

Edwin Way Teale

Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.

God | Joy | Thought | God | Thought |

Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

God does not rule the world outwardly by gravitation and chemical affinity, but inwardly in the heart of man: as is your soul, so will the destiny be of the world in which you live and do.

Freedom | Words |

Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.

Thought | Thought |

Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

All the gods are dead except the god of war

Pain | Thought | Will | Thought |

Albert Einstein

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being.

Achievement | Beauty | Conduct | Good | Harmony | Important | Thought | Beauty | Old | Thought |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

My dear Francie, life is too short for all this. (Though that was not the matter with life, really: life was too long.)

Life | Life | Thinking | Thought | Thought |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices. You cannot even simply become a mother anymore. You must choose motherhood. Will you choose change? Can you become its vanguard?

Action | Land | People |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

Need | Thought | Worry | Thought |

Elias Canetti

It is the sublime miracle of the human mind: memory.

Enemy | Thinking | Thought | Thought |

Elias Canetti

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.

Freedom |

Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

Not me, of course, as I am now officially a spinster librarian and must stay home with my cat and drink tea.

Bravery | Courage | Power | Strength | Thought | Thought |