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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Better | Care | Day | Dispute | Excitement | Knowing | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

Noise |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I had gone... to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

Better | Care | Day | Dispute | Excitement | Good | Knowing | Lord | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

For all the poor in the world against all tyranny.

Good | People | Price |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

Better | Courage | Good | Kill | Light | Loneliness | Love | Man | People | Time | Will | Wishes | World | Afraid |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'

Little | Question |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and woman have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Wash someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else?

Future | Plan | Time |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.

Effort | Science |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

If technology is felt to be becoming more and more inhuman, we might do well to consider whether it is possible to have something better - a technology with a human face.

Evil | Majority | Nothing | Right | Work |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities—because they pay for the infrastructure—and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly overstate its achievement.

Existence | Labor |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

Age | Belief | Language |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Revolutionaries filling the world banging for the world to not sleep weighed on the bodies of the poor.

Better | Birth | Hope | Labor | Life | Life | Time | Will |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The value of the life of these lower savages is like that of the anthropoid apes, or very little higher. All recent travelers who have carefully observed them in their native lands, and studied their bodily structure and psychic life, agree in this opinion.

Appreciation | Body | Science | Appreciation | Learn |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption.

Effort | Labor | Machines | Means | Nothing | People |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Can we establish an ideology, or whatever you like to call it, which insists that the educated have taken upon themselves an obligation and have not simply acquired a "passport to privilege"? Â…It is, you might well say, an elementary matter of justice.

Fanaticism | Means | Objectives |

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes

The road to freedom lies not through mysteries or occult performances, but through the intelligent use of natural forces and laws.

Thought | Will | Intellect | Thought |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The doctrine of derivation, or theory of descent, as a comprehensive theory of the natural origin of all organisms, assumes that all compound organisms are derived from simple ones, all many-celled animals and plants from single-celled ones, and these last from quite simple primary organisms—from monads. As we see the organic species, the multiform varieties of animals and plants, vary under our eyes through adaptation, while the similarity of their internal structure is reasonably explicable only by inheritance from common parent-forms, we are forced to assume common parent-forms for at least the great main divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and for the classes, orders, and so forth.

Reason |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own "system" and accuses every other "system" as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both.

Labor | Purpose | Purpose |

Ethel Barrymore

When life knocks you to your knees, and it will, why, get up! If it knocks you to your knees again, as it will, well, isn't that the best position from which to pray?