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 Dean Howells

It is the still voice that the soul heeds; not the deafening blasts of doom.

Character | Soul |

Paul W. Ivey, fully Paul Wesley Ivey

Study the unusually successful people you know, and you will find them imbued with enthusiasm for their work which is contagious. Not only are they themselves excited about what they are doing, but they also get you excited.

Character | Enthusiasm | People | Study | Will | Work |

William James

Nature... is frugal in her operations and will not be at the expense of a particular instinct to give us that knowledge which experience and habit will soon produce. Reproduced sights and contacts tied together with the present sensation in the unity of a thing with a name, these are complex objective stuff out of which my actually perceived table is made. Infants must go through a long education of the eye and ear before they can perceive the realities which adults perceive. Every perception is an acquired perception.

Character | Education | Experience | Habit | Instinct | Knowledge | Nature | Perception | Present | Unity | Will |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

When we choose to give to others, we will appreciate how much we have - no matter how little it may actually be. And when we start to love our neighbors, we will end up also loving ourselves.

Character | Little | Love | Will |

David Hume

Curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence, and requires youth, leisure, education, genius and example to make it govern any person.

Character | Curiosity | Education | Example | Genius | Influence | Knowledge | Leisure | Love | Youth | Govern |

David Hume

The chief and most confounding objection to excessive skepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigor. We need only ask such a skeptic, what his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer.

Character | Force | Good | Meaning | Need | Skepticism |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Character | Freedom | Intelligence | Love |

Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth , for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time.

Better | Character | Good | Knowledge | Love | Time | Wealth | Will | Friends |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

When we practice the ridiculous habit of judging by appearances, we cut ourselves off from the good which the situation or person holds for us.

Character | Good | Habit | Practice |

Trevor Huddleston

We are created by God for union with Himself... That’s really the meaning of heaven too: fulfillment, wholeness... Though no man has seen God, we have to learn how to love God through loving one another.

Character | Fulfillment | God | Heaven | Love | Man | Meaning | Wholeness | God | Learn |

Victor Hugo

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

Character | Heart |

Maria Jane Jewsbury

Love is the purification of the heart from self; it strengthens and ennobles the character; gives higher motive and nobler aim to every action of life, and makes both man and woman strong, noble, and courageous. The power to love truly and devotedly is the nobles gift with which a human being can be endowed; but it is a sacred fire that must not be burned to idols.

Action | Character | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Power | Sacred | Self | Woman |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Life and love are not essentially about “a few persons nearest us.” They are found in the spiritual nature that unites us, even if everything else separates us. Apart from this unity, we are still lonesome and alienated - we are merely lonesome together, alienated together.

Character | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Unity |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The beatitude into which the enlightened soul is delivered is something quite different from pleasure... Blessedness depends on non-attachment and selflessness, therefore can be enjoyed without satiety and without revulsion; is a participation in eternity, and therefore remains itself without diminution or fluctuation.

Blessedness | Character | Eternity | Pleasure | Satiety | Soul |

Ron and Mary Hulnick, formally H. Ronald Hulnick and

Because I am the only person I will have a relationship with all of my life, I choose: To love myself the way I am now. To always acknowledge that I am enough just the way I am. To love, honor and cherish myself. To be my own best friend. To be the person I would like to spend the rest of my life with. To always take care of myself so that I can take care of others. To always grow, develop and share my love and life.

Care | Character | Enough | Friend | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Relationship | Rest | Will |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility.

Character | Knowledge | Love |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

We can only love what we know and we can never know completely what we do not love.

Character | Love |

Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by others, but wishes to plunge from himself into himself, to become nothing, as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in himself, he is completely with God.

Character | Desire | God | Humility | Man | Nothing | Power | Silence | Soul | Wishes |

Thomas Jefferson

An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second.

Character | Heart | Knowing |

Thomas Jefferson

Gaming corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.

Character | Habit | Mankind |