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

Christian D. Larson

Every desire for power, ability, wisdom, harmony, life, greatness will impress itself upon the subconscious and will cause the thing desired to be produced in the great within. What is produced in the within will come forth into expression in the personality; therefore, by knowing how to impress the subconscious, man may give his personal self any quality desired, in any quantity desired. What man may desire to become, that he can become, and the art of directing and impressing the subconscious is the secret. The perpetual awakening of the great within will produce a greatness, because to the powers and the possibilities of the great within there is no limit, neither is there any end.

Ability | Art | Awakening | Cause | Character | Desire | Greatness | Harmony | Knowing | Life | Life | Man | Personality | Power | Self | Will | Wisdom | Art |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

He surely is most in need of another's patience, who has none of his own.

Character | Need | Patience |

Alexander Maclaren

A man who has not learned to say “no” - who is not resolved that he will take God’s way in spite of every dog that can bark at him, in spite of every silvery voice that can woo him aside - will be a weak and wretched man till he dies.

Character | God | Man | Will |

Manilius, fully Marcus Manilius NULL

It is shameful for a man to live as a stranger in his own country, and to be uninformed of her affairs and interests.

Character | Man |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him.

Character | Man |

John Locke

The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The existence of a God, reason clearly makes known to us, as has been shown. The knowledge of existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connection of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history.

Character | Existence | God | History | Intuition | Knowledge | Man | Memory | Mind | Reason | World | God |

John Locke

All the Actions, that we have any Idea of, reducing themselves, as has been said, to these two, viz. Thinking and Motion, so far as a Man has a power to think, or not to think; to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a Man Free. Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a Man’s power; wherever doing or not doing, will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind directing it, there he is not Free, though perhaps the Action may be voluntary.

Action | Character | Forbearance | Man | Mind | Power | Preference | Thinking | Will |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Desire is the uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it.

Absence | Character | Desire | Enjoyment | Man | Present |

Yeruchem Levovitz, aka The Mashgiach

Anger is a deadly poison not only for the soul, but even for the body. We should flee from anger as we would from the worst torture.

Anger | Body | Character | Soul | Torture |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A man has virtues enough if, on account of them, he deserves forgiveness for his faults.

Character | Enough | Forgiveness | Man | Forgiveness |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

I consider it a mark of great prudence in a man to abstain from threats or any contemptuous expressions, for neither of these weaken the enemy, but threats make him more cautious, and the other excites his hatred, and a desire to revenge himself.

Character | Desire | Enemy | Man | Prudence | Prudence | Revenge |

Thomas C. Murphy

The man who is a drunkard has no intellectual freedom. Science declares that alcohol seeks the intellectual faculties, clogs the brain cells, distorts the reason, vitiates the mind, shatters the nerve centres, and he who is diseased with inebriety cannot enjoy intellectual freedom.

Character | Freedom | Man | Mind | Reason | Science |

Thomas Middleton

A man is never too old to learn.

Character | Man | Wisdom | Old |

William Mitford

Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.

Character | Death | Evil | Fear | Good | Man | Men |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

We do not aim to correct the man we hang; we correct and warn others by him.

Character | Man |

Arthur Ernest Morgan

Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have.

Character | Important | Man | Tragedy |

Axel Munthe, fully Axel Martin Frederik Munthe

A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself.

Character | Man |

Don Carlos Musser

Because of the law of cessation, a man is "as he thinketh in his heart." Nothing can happen without its adequate cause.

Cause | Character | Heart | Law | Man | Nothing |