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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Abstract | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Blasphemy | Language | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.

Glory | Nothing | Sacrifice | Words |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Future | Man | Means | Science | Technology | Words |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind.

Art | Consolation | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Speech | Work | World | Writing | Art |

Eudora Welty

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

Ambiguity | Words |

Eugene Peterson

The mistake we so often make is thinking that GodÂ’s interest and care for us waxes and wanes according to our spiritual temperature.

God | Lord | Sense | Words | God |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Memory, as we have seen, consists only in the power of reviving the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances that attended them; a power which never takes place, except when by the analogy of the signs we have chosen, and by the order we have settled between our ideas, the objects which we want to revive are connected with some of our present wants.

Words | Trouble |

Eugene Peterson

Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, donÂ’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

Waiting | Words |

Eudora Welty

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

Character | Good | Pleasure | Speech | Thought | World | Think | Thought |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

With regard to natural cries, this man shall form them, as soon as he feels the passions to which they belong. However they will not be signs in respect to him the first time; because instead of reviving .his perceptions, they will as yet be no more than consequences of those perceptions.

Character | Necessity | Order | Present | Words |

Eugene Peterson

It is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts.

Little | Words |

Eudora Welty

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you — and other people — any trouble.

Heart | Mind | Reading | Words | Writing |

Eugene Peterson

The story behind the writing of The Message (this was especially interesting to me).

God | Silence | Words | God |

Eugene Peterson

We learn to live not by our feelings about God but by the facts about God. If I break my leg I do not become less a person. My wife and children do not reject me. Neither when my faith fractures or my feelings bruise does God cast me off and reject me.

Words |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Let us consider man the first moment of his existence; his mind immediately feels different sensations; such as light, colors, pain, pleasure, motion, rest: these arc his first thoughts.

Time | Words |

Eugene Peterson

You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in spiritual direction. Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters.

Sound | Speech | Words |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Words |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.

Words |