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

Elizabeth Gilbert

In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

God | People | Question | God |

William Shakespeare

Stay, stay thy hands! thou art an Amazon, and fightest with the sword of Deborah.

Anger | Man | Question | Reason |

Elizabeth Gilbert

But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.

Business | Ceremony | Church | Marriage | Morality | Rest | Vows | Will | Business |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.

Control | Fate | Grace | Little | Man | Need | Play | Question | Will | Fate |

Elizabeth Gilbert

When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become log-jammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.

Better | Distress | Heart | Inquiry | Question | Security | Will |

Elizabeth Gilbert

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

Better | Care | Order | Question | Solitude | Will | Woman |

Elizabeth Gilbert

We had more fun waiting in line together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their honeymoons. We gave each other same nickname, so there would be no separation between us. We made goals, vows, promises and dinner together. He read books to me...

Day | Need | Question |

Elizabeth Lesser

It does pay to be honest. It pays in rewarding relationships. It pays in unblocked energy. It pays in passion. To stand tall in who you are, unafraid to reveal what you want and need, kind enough to tell the truth, and brave enough to bear the consequences, is a telling sign of spiritual development.

Compassion | Generosity | Life | Life | Meaning | Morality | Openness | Religion | Thought | Thought |

Elizabeth Gilbert

What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God

God | Question | God |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

This is the testimony of all the good books, sermons, hymns, and memoirs I read--that God's ways are infinitely perfect; that we are to love Him for what He is and therefore equally as much when He afflicts as when He prospers us; that there is no real happiness but in doing and suffering His will; and that this life is but a scene of probation through which we pass to the real life above.

Question |

Dorothy Parker

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Question | Time |

Emil M. Cioran

What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

Question | Time | Think |

Emma Goldman

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.

Body | Earth | Fear | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Morality | Pain | Religion | Self-denial | Sorrow | Soul | Struggle |

Emma Goldman

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.

Mind | Past | Question | Right | Time |

Emma Goldman

One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.

Inevitable | Inferiority | Merit | Position | Question | Right | Woman |

Emma Goldman

Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass.

Belief | Daring | Fear | Fidelity | Honesty | Life | Life | Morality |

Emmet Fox

If you will change your mind concerning anything and absolutely keep it changed, that thing must and will change too. It is the keeping up of the change in thought that is difficult. It calls for vigilance and determination.

God | Question | Thinking | Will | God |

Emmet Fox

If the survival of humanity depended upon you or me, it would be a poor lookout for the Great Enterprise, would it not? The captain is on the bridge.

Humanity | Question | Universe | Worry |

Emma Goldman

The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

Glory | Morality | Pain | Religion | Self-denial | Sorrow |

Emmet Fox

Stop thinking about your difficulties, whatever they are, and start thinking about God instead.

Difficulty | God | Knowing | Life | Life | Metaphysics | Question | Success | Truth | Work | Wrong | Following | God |