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

John Locke

Madmen... do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.

Character | Ideas | Men | Mistake | Principles | Right | Wrong |

Yeruchem Levovitz, aka The Mashgiach

Who is a righteous man and who is an evil man? Many people think a righteous man is one who does not transgress, and the evil person is one who constantly transgresses. But even the very righteous also transgress and even the very wicked perform good deeds. The essential difference between the two is that a righteous person tries to overcome his desires to do wrong and the evil person does not.

Character | Deeds | Evil | Good | Man | People | Wrong | Think |

Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay

Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.

Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |

William Morley Punshon

Speak the truth by all means; be bold and fearless in your rebuke of error, and in your keener rebuke of wrong doing; but be human, and loving, and gentle, and brotherly the while.

Character | Error | Means | Rebuke | Truth | Wrong |

Publius Syrus

Suspicion breeds rivals for herself... The suspicious man condemns the good faith of all... Suspicion is an unspoken wrong to tested worth.

Character | Faith | Good | Man | Suspicion | Worth | Wrong |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

Self-expression can be wrong as well as right... When self-expression is identified with irrational surrender to lower instincts, it ends by making the person a slave to those passions. Self-denial is not a renunciation of freedom; it is rather the taming of what is savage and base in our nature for what is higher and better. It is a release from imprisonment by our lusts and passions.

Better | Character | Ends | Freedom | Nature | Right | Self | Self-denial | Surrender | Wrong |

Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Character | Inferiority | Man | Right | Superiority | Wrong |

Daniel Webster

If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon bronze, time will efface it; if we build temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal souls, if we imbue them with just principles of action, with fear of wrong and love of right, we engrave on those tables something which no time can obliterate, and which will brighten and brighten through all eternity.

Action | Character | Eternity | Fear | Love | Principles | Right | Time | Will | Work | Wrong |

Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

Man | Opinion | Right | Wisdom | Wrong |

Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett

The ideas of the average decently informed person are so warped, and of perspective, and ignorant, and entirely perverse and wrong and crude, on nearly every moral subject, that the task of discussing anything with him seriously and fully and to the end is simply appalling.

Ideas | Wisdom | Wrong |

Paul Bourget, fully Paul Charles Joseph Bourget

Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking; just as ill health indicates bad regimen.

Health | Thinking | Unhappiness | Wisdom | Wrong |