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

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.

Love | Unhappiness | Happiness |

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, fully David Martyn Lloyd Jones

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you.

Life | Life | Listening | Problems | Self | Talking | Unhappiness |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

Unhappiness | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness | Vice |

Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Purpose | Purpose | Unhappiness |

Michel Foucault

Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.

Absolute | Abstract | Citizenship | Duty | Men | Right | Suffering | Unhappiness | Loss |

Nachman of Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Bratslav, Nachman from Uman NULL

Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow - the wholesome warmth necessary to make the heart-blood circulate healthily and freely; unhappiness - the chilling pressure which produces here an inflammation, there an excrescence and worst, of all, "the mind's green and yellow sickness" - ill temper.

Children | Fear | Good | Unhappiness | Happiness |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

A strong determination to be happy will help you. Do not wait for your circumstances to change, thinking falsely that in them lies the trouble. Do not make unhappiness a chronic habit, thereby afflicting yourself and your associates. It is blessedness for yourself and others if you are happy. If you possess happiness you possess everything; to be happy is to be in tune with God. That power to be happy comes through meditation.

Blessedness | Circumstances | Determination | Happy | Power | Thinking | Unhappiness | Will | Happiness |

Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

People | Unhappiness | Writing | Think |

Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

Our thoughts have prepared us for the happiness or unhappiness we experience.

Unhappiness | Happiness |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I’m telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.

Ambition | Anxiety | Anxiety | Attainment | Better | Day | Happy | Heart | Joy | Man | Means | Object | Plenty | Right | Teach | Unhappiness | Ambition | Friends | Happiness | Winning |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The conceptions I have summarized here I first put forward only tentatively, but in the course of time they have won such a hold over me that I can no longer think in any other way.

Attention | Better | Cause | Change | Civilization | Ethics | Example | Love | Nothing | Possessions | Precept | Religion | Unhappiness | Virtue | Virtue | Obstacle | Think |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me.

Life | Life | Memory | Time | Unhappiness |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.

Aid | Authenticity | Comfort | Faith | Giving | Man | Praise | Truth | Unhappiness | War | Woman | Yielding | Victim |

Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

Life | Life | Unhappiness |

Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

I lay very little stress either upon asking or giving advice. Generally speaking, they who ask advice know what they wish to do, and remain firm to their intentions. A man may allow himself to be enlightened on various points, even upon matters of expediency and duty; but, after all, he must determine his course of action, for himself.

Events | Life | Life | Nature | Unhappiness | Happiness |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | People | Unhappiness |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | Unhappiness |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

All emanates from Source!...You're not this body and its accomplishments. You are the observer. Notice it all; and be grateful for the abilities you've been given, the motivation to achieve, and the stuff you've accumulated. But give all the credit to the power of intention, which brought you into existence.

Blame | Change | Fault | Focus | Unhappiness | Waste | Will | Fault | Guilty |

Tryon Edwards

There are many times and circumstances in life when "Our strength is, to sit still."

Unhappiness |