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

Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler

Spend time thinking about the virtues of other people. Do not merely do this as a passing thought, but try to feel pleasure in thinking of their virtues.

Character | People | Pleasure | Thinking | Thought | Time |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus rise and increase.

Character | Important | Men | Morality | Success | Will | World |

Antoinette Du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières

Seeking to know is only too often learning to doubt.

Character | Doubt | Learning |

Henry Havelock Ellis

To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

Character | Men | Leader |

Nathaniel Emmons

Death stamps the characters and conditions of men for eternity. As death finds them in this world, so will they be in the next.

Character | Death | Eternity | Men | Will | World |

Euripedes NULL

Wise men take occasion by the hand.

Character | Men | Wisdom | Wise |

George Farquhar

Women never really command until they have given their promise to obey; and they are never in more danger of being made slaves than when the men are at their feet.

Character | Danger | Men | Promise | Danger |

Albert Einstein

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.

Character | Fear | Insecurity | Men | Pain | Surrender |

Emil Fackenheim, fully Emil Ludwig Fackenheim

Man can never escape the ideal or absolute; he can merely exchange one absolute for another. He can ignore anything beyond his needs only by making an ideal out of the fulfillment of his needs themselves. In short, man cannot be an animal; he can only be a philosopher or anthropologist who asserts that men are animals and ought to live like them. It is not necessary to point out that this is just to set up another absolute.

Absolute | Character | Fulfillment | Man | Men |

Charles Alexander Eastman, first named Ohiyesa

It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. Its appeal is to the material part, and if allowed its way, it will in time disturb one’s spiritual balance. Therefore, children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving. If a child is inclined to be grasping, or to cling to any of his or her little possessions, legends are related about the contempt and disgrace falling upon the ungenerous and mean person... The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have - to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return.

Balance | Beauty | Belief | Character | Children | Contempt | Disgrace | Generosity | Giving | Guests | Hope | Legends | Little | Love | Possessions | Simplicity | Taste | Time | Weakness | Will | Beauty | Child | Happiness | Learn |

Tyron Edwards

Sincerity is no test of truth - no evidence of correctness of conduct. You may take poison sincerely believing it the needed medicine, but will it save your life?

Character | Conduct | Correctness | Evidence | Life | Life | Sincerity | Truth | Will |

L. G. Elliott, fully Lloyd George Elliott

Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellows. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter.

Action | Character | Men | People | Respect | Wisdom | Respect |

Clarence Shepard Day, Jr.

If men can ever learn to accept their truths as not final, and if they an ever learn to build on something better than dogma, they may not be found saying, discouragedly, every once in so often, that every civilization carries in it the seeds of decay.

Better | Character | Civilization | Dogma | Men | Learn | Truths |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

It is in those acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look around with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness, calling their denial knowledge.

Character | Earth | Joy | Knowledge | Men | Waste |

Declaration of Independence NULL

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Self | Truths |

Francis Alexander Durivage

They teach us to remember; why do not they teach us to forget? There is not a man living who has not, some time in his life, admitted that memory was as much of a curse as a blessing.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Memory | Teach | Time |

Alighieri Dante

There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.

Character | Happy | Pain | Time |

Owen Feltham

Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sing of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer.

Character | Ignorance | Man | Study | Torture |

Henry Fielding

Perhaps the summary of good-breeding may be reduced to this rule. “Behave unto all men as you would they should behave to you.” This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them.

Character | Civility | Desire | Good | Mankind | Men | Nothing | Respect | Rule | Will |