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

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man.

Knowledge | Power | Wisdom |

Tibetan Proverbs

Landing a single punch on your enemies nose is more satisfying than hearing well-intentioned advice from your elders.

Knowing | Wisdom |

Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett

Nature I'll court in her sequester'd haunts, by mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove, or cell; where the pois'd lark his evening ditty chants, and health, and peace, and contemplation dwell.

Wisdom |

Hugh Blair

By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends.

Cheerfulness | Dignity | Enjoyment | Folly | Joy | Mind | Mirth | Pleasure | Religion | Spirit | Struggle | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Happiness |

Tom Brown, Jr.

I don't see how anybody could have a passion for nature without having an equally developed tolerance for the cold.

Wisdom |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'.

Culture | Wisdom | World |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks

Ideas | Think |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

Better | Dogma | Humor | Ideas | People | Sense | Spirit |

William Shakespeare

A thousand hearts are great within my bosom: Advance our standards, set upon our foes; Our ancient word of courage, fair St. George, Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons! Upon them! Victory sits upon our helms.

Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

William Shakespeare

Be these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense; that keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope.

Wisdom |

Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes.

Belief | Children | People | Society | Wisdom | Society | Happiness |

William Godwin

Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil.

Good | Ideas | Judgment | Man | Men | Nature | Nothing | Object | Right | Sense | Submission | Will | Truths |

William James

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

Criticism | Darkness | Feelings | Ideas | Right |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

Knowledges (or cognitions), in common use with Bacon and our English philosophers till after the time of Locke, ought not to be discarded. It is, however, unnoticed by any English lexicographer.

Ideas |

William James

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Conduct | Day | Feelings | Ideas | Indispensable | Life | Life | Phenomena | Religion | Theories | Thought | Thought |

William James

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it.

Ideas | Means | Power |

William Law

If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.

Glory | God | Reason | Wisdom | God | Happiness |

William Law

Though the light and comfort of the outward world keeps even the worst men from any constant strong sensibility of that wrathful, fiery, dark and self-tormenting nature that is the very essence of every fallen unregenerate soul, yet every man in the world has more or less frequent and strong intimations given him that so it is with him in the inmost ground of his soul. How many inventions are some people forced to have recourse to in order to keep off a certain inward uneasiness, which they are afraid of and know not whence it comes? Alas, it is because there is a fallen spirit, a dark, aching fire, within them, which has never had its proper relief and is trying to discover itself and calling out for help at every cessation of worldly joy.

Devotion | Means | Piety | Spirit | Temper | Wisdom | World |

William Law

Many people not only lose the benefit, but are even the worse for their mortifications [i.e., sacrifices, abstentions]... because they mistake the whole nature and worth of them: they practice them for their own sakes, as things good in themselves, they think them to be real parts of holiness, and so rest in them and look no further, but grow full of a self-esteem and self-admiration for their own progress in them. This makes them self-sufficient, morose, severe judges of all those that fall short of their mortifications. And thus their self-denials do only that for them which indulgences do for other people: they withstand and hinder the operation of God upon their souls, and instead of being really self-denials, they strengthen and keep up the kingdom of self.

Wisdom |

William James

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

Ideas | Inconsistency |