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

William Cowper

Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.

Boys | Care | Error | Little |

Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor

Error | Honesty | Life | Life | Man | Science | Theories | Universe |

Wendell Phillips

The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.

Change | Evidence | God | Search | God |

Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

This application of the concept of statistical laws was finally formulated in the second half of the last century as the so-called statistical mechanics. In this theory, which is based on Newton's mechanics, the consequences that spring from an incomplete knowledge of a complicated mechanical system are investigated. Thus in principle it is not a renunciation of determinism. The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. .. This state of affairs is best described by saying that all particles are basically nothing but different stationary states of one and the same stuff. Thus even the three basic building-stones have become reduced to a single one. There is only one kind of matter but it can exist in different discrete stationary conditions.

Error | Mistake | Unity |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

[The Devil said:] It seems but yesterday that I launched Hell’s Five Hundred Year Plan.… I saw that Hell had to move with the tide and leave the rest to rationalism, liberalism and universal compulsory education… At first there was some opposition in Hell. Baal, Beelzebub and a handful of almost aboriginal demons who are still living in the 10th Century B.C. and have not had an idea since the Fall, naturally opposed the New Deal.

Devil | Evidence | Good | Hell | Man | World |

Wilhelm Reich

I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life.

Art | Better | Error | Existence | Insight | Labor | Meaning | Nature | Perfection | Research | Thought | Will | Work | World | Art | Learn | Think | Thought |

Wilhelm Reich

Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. To be radical, according to Marx, means “going to the root of things.” If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain.

Absolute | Doubt | Error | Existence | Machines | Nations | People | Power | Proletariat | Rationality | Sin | Wrong |

Wilhelm Reich

Life springs from thousands of sources vibrant, hands up everyone who cling to, refuses to be expressed in phrases tedious, only accepts actions transparent, truthful words of love and pleasure

Choice | Cruelty | Doctrine | Energy | Error | Fate | Greatness | Insight | Labor | Life | Life | Light | Little | Love | Man | Marriage | Meanness | Men | Simplicity | Time | Truth | World | Cruelty | Fate | Child | Friends | Value |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.

Evidence | Hope | Knowledge | Little | Men | Need | Thought | Thought |

Wilhelm Reich

He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that’s because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word “radical.” His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.

Energy | Error | Existence | Meaning |

Walter Hilton

One who loves God retains this humility at all times, not with weariness and struggle, but with pleasure and gladness.

Error | Looks |

Walter Lippmann

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

Error | Study |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Choose to see death as simply removing a garment or moving from one room to another... it's merely a transition.

Evidence | Greatness | Life | Life | People | Sense | Spirit |

Washington Irving

The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.

Affliction | Agony | Consolation | Duty | Error | Friend | Grief | Love | Meditation | Mother | Present | Sadness | Sorrow | Child |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Have you ever noticed when you’re in the presence of certain people that you feel better about yourself? Their compassionate energy has the noticeably pleasant impact of simply making you feel really good about yourself. You’ll impact others with this energy of compassion as you develop your connection to intention.

Evidence | Faith | Fear | God | God |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Anything that has been accomplished by any other human being in the physical realm is within the field of possibility.

Ability | Evidence | Talent |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

There is a voice in the Universe urging us to remember our purpose for being on this great Earth. This is the voice of inspiration, which is within each and every one of us.

Evidence | Relationship | Thinking | Wrong |

Wendell Berry

The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.

Ability | Abundance | Defeat | Desire | Evidence | Hope | Ignorance | Knowledge | Problems | Revelation | World |