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

Albert Einstein

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead, choose death because we cannot forget quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings; remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do this, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

Character | Death | Humanity | Knowledge | Paradise | Progress | Rest | Risk | Wisdom |

Tyron Edwards

Duty performed gives clearness and firmness to faith, and faith thus strengthened through duty becomes the more assured and satisfying soul.

Character | Duty | Faith | Firmness | Soul |

Albert Einstein

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Character | Knowledge | Laughter | Truth |

Shneur Zalman of Liadi

A little light will dispel much darkness.

Character | Darkness | Light | Little | Will |

John Dewey

Genuine intellectual integrity is found in experimental knowing. Until this lesson is fully learned, it is not safe to dissociate knowledge from experiment nor experiment from experience.

Character | Experience | Experiment | Integrity | Knowing | Knowledge | Lesson | Safe |

Tyron Edwards

The influences of little things are as real, and as constantly about us, as the air we breathe or the light by which we see. These are the small - the often invisible - the almost unthought of strands, which are inweaving and twisting by millions, to bind us to character - to good or evil here, and to heaven or hell hereafter.

Character | Evil | Good | Heaven | Hell | Light | Little |

Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach

The usefulness of historical knowledge in philosophy, here as elsewhere, is that the prejudices of our own period may lose their grip on us if we imaginatively enter into another period, when people’s prejudices were different.

Character | Knowledge | People | Philosophy | Usefulness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set at night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere.

Character | Eternity | Light | Reality | Soul | Will | Wisdom |

Owen Feltham

Works without faith are like a fish without water, it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action is as a stone laid.

Action | Character | Faith | Good | Wants |

Henry Fielding

There is a sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had in conversation; so necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers the true practical system can be learned only in the world.

Books | Character | Conversation | Human nature | Knowledge | Learning | Men | Nature | Power | System | Understanding | World |

Benjamin Franklin

Education begins with life. Before we are aware the foundations of character are laid, and subsequent teaching avails but little to remove or alter them... If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

Character | Education | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man |

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

All the evil in the world is the fault of the self-styled pure in heart, a result of their eagerness to unearth secrets and expose them to the light of the sun.

Character | Evil | Fault | Heart | Light | Self | World | Fault |

Owen Feltham

Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them. It gets the name of willfulness when it will not admit of a lawful change to the better. Therefore constancy without knowledge cannot be always good. In things ill it is not virtue, but an absolute vice.

Absolute | Better | Change | Character | Constancy | Good | Knowledge | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Will |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

Character | Life | Life | Light | Power |