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

Monvel, pseudonymn for Jacques Marie Boutet NULL

Some virtue is needed, but not too much. Excess in anything is a defect.

Character | Excess | Virtue | Virtue |

Michael Murphy

No discipline is immune to excess or lack of wisdom. All programs for human betterment can be undermined by ignorance, imcompetence, or moral perversity.

Character | Discipline | Excess | Ignorance | Wisdom |

Ronald E. Osborn

When the taste is purified, the morals are not easily corrupted. Whatever injures the body, the morals, or the mind, will lessen or vitiate taste; thus, disorders of the body and violent passions of the mind, will do this, and so will also excessive care or covetousness; but above all, a habit of intemperance, and keeping low company will greatly deprave that which was once a good taste.

Body | Care | Character | Good | Habit | Intemperance | Mind | Taste | Will |

Plotinus NULL

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever in the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Beauty | Body | Character | Life | Life | Order | Self | Soul |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men.

Character | Excess | Men | Trouble |

Plotinus NULL

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering - Lethe stream may be understood in this sense - and memory is a fact of the soul.

Body | Cause | Character | Forgetfulness | Memory | Sense | Soul | Will |

William Penn

Love labor: for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayest for physic. It is wholesome for the body and good for thy mind.

Body | Character | Good | Labor | Love | Mind |

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

The health of the soul is to have its faculties - reason, high spirit, and desire - happily tempered, with reason in command, and reining in both the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance.

Character | Desire | Health | Reason | Soul | Spirit |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A feeble body weakens the mind.

Body | Character | Mind |

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Lord John Russell

Collision is as necessary to produce virtue in men as it is to elicit fire in inanimate matter; and chivalry is the essence of virtue.

Character | Men | Virtue | Virtue |

Winfred Rhoades, fully Winfred Chesney Rhoades

Not the state of the body but the state of mind and soul is the measure of the well-being of each of us.

Body | Character | Mind | Soul |

Logan Pearsall Smith

We grow with the years more fragile in body but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Body | Character | Conscience |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

Albert Schweitzer

Happiness! That's nothing more than good health and a poor memory.

Character | Good | Health | Memory | Nothing |

Charles Simmons

Impure thoughts awaken impure feelings, lead to impure expressions, and beget impure actions, and these lead to imbecility both of body and mind, and to the ruin of all that is noble and pure in character.

Body | Character | Feelings | Mind |

Logan Pearsall Smith

The lusts and greeds of the Body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.

Body | Character | Soul |

Gordon-Michael Scallion

All life is initiation. Each experience, each act, deed, especially thoughts, are a portion of initiation. Initiation then is the process whereby the entity - the soul force, is given the opportunity to develop spiritually. This means, that when the soul chooses to improve itself - to move towards a greater light, the soul body so changes its vibration as to remove from its spiritual fabric those attachments detrimental to its path upward.

Body | Character | Experience | Force | Life | Life | Light | Means | Opportunity | Soul |