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

Sydney Smith

That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward.

Better | Character | Charity | Duty | Future | God | Hope | Ingratitude | Labor | Looks | Man | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Work | World | God |

Noah benShea

Life is not always wonderful, but it is an experience filled with wonder.

Character | Experience | Life | Life | Wonder |

Samuel Smiles

Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.

Character | Experience | Good | Sense | Wisdom |

O. Carl Simonton

The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be.

Character | Children | Experience | Health | Land | Love | Men | Self | Wisdom |

Alexander Smith

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human [mortal] life.

Character | Life | Life | Mortal | Trifles | Happiness |

Alexander Smith

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.

Character | Life | Life | Mortal | Trifles | Happiness |

Jeremy Taylor

It is a little learning, and but a little, which makes men conclude hastily. Experience and humility teach modesty and fear.

Character | Experience | Fear | Humility | Learning | Little | Men | Modesty | Teach |

Jeremy Taylor

Men are apt to prefer a prosperous error to an afflicted truth.

Character | Error | Men | Truth |

H. W. Andrews

While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision.

Action | Better | Consideration | Courage | Decision | Experience | Failure | Fear | Habit | Judgment | Man | Mind | Nothing | Position | Question | Responsibility | Right | Time | Will | Wisdom | Failure |

Daniel Webster

He that has a "spirit of detail" will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university. Such an one is minute and particular. He adjusts trifles; and these trifles compose most of the business and happiness of life. Great events happen seldom, and affect few; trifles happen every moment to everybody; and though one occurrence of them adds little to the happiness or misery of life, yet the sum total of their continual repetition is of the highest consequence.

Better | Business | Character | Events | Life | Life | Little | Spirit | Trifles | Will | Business | Happiness |

William Whewell

Every failure is a step to success; every detection of what is false directs us toward what is true; every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so, but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, is the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of error is without some latent charm derived from truth.

Character | Detection | Error | Failure | Success | Thought | Truth | Failure | Trial |

Daniel Webster

Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.

Character | Children | Control | Evil | Future | Habit | Passion | Prejudice | Self | Self-control | Society | Will |

John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.

Experience | Life | Life | Man | Suffering | Will | Wisdom | Learn |

William L. Abbott

Develop the art of friendliness. One can experience a variety of emotions staying home and reading or watching television; one will be alive but hardly living. Most of the meaningful aspects of life are closely associated with people. Even the dictionary definition of life involves people.

Art | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | People | Reading | Television | Will | Wisdom | Art |