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

Thomas Chalmers

The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system, a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include al the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities, and indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences.

Character | Experiment | Ignorance | Indolence | Love | Mind | Nature | Observation | Phenomena | Prejudice | Repose | Simplicity | System | Understanding | Will |

Frédéric Chopin, fully Frédéric François Chopin, born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Character | Difficulty | Repose | Will |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.

Character | Destiny | Illusion | Longing | Man | Mind | Repose |

David Hume

It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated.

Character | Faith | Instinct | Men | Perception | Reason | Repose | Universe |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

There is no mortal truly wise and restless at once; wisdom is the repose of minds.

Character | Mortal | Repose | Wisdom | Wise |

Edward Thomson

What, what is virtue, but repose of mind. A pure ethereal calm, that knows no storm; above the reach of wild ambitions’ wind, above those passions that this world deform and torture man.

Character | Man | Mind | Repose | Torture | Virtue | Virtue | World |

Harold W Thompson

What, what is virtue but repose of mind?

Character | Mind | Repose | Virtue | Virtue |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Thou hast made us of Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless 'til they repose in Thee.

Lord | Repose | Wisdom |

Richard Cecil

How simply I can trust in man, and how little in God! How unreasonable is a pure act of faith in one like ourselves, if we cannot repose the same faith in God.

Faith | God | Little | Man | Repose | Trust | Wisdom |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Wisdom is the repose of the mind.

Mind | Repose | Wisdom |

Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

There is no happiness for him who oppresses and persecutes; there can be no repose for him. For the sighs of the unfortunate cry for vengeance to heaven.

Heaven | Repose | Vengeance | Wisdom | Happiness |

William Gilmore Simms

Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.

Body | Mind | Repose | Solitude | Wisdom |

Abigail Adams

It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed… Great necessities call out great virtues.

Life | Life | Repose |

Alexis Carrel

Prayer stamps with its indelible mark our actions and demeanor. A tranquility of bearing, a facial and bodily repose are observed in those whose inner lives are thus enriched. Within the depths of consciousness a flame kindles. And man sees himself. He discovers his selfishness, his silly pride, his fear, his greeds, his blunder. He develops a sense of moral obligation, intellectual humility. Thus begins a journey of the soul toward the realm of grace.

Consciousness | Demeanor | Fear | Grace | Humility | Journey | Man | Obligation | Prayer | Pride | Repose | Selfishness | Sense | Soul |

Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization.

Civilization | Humanity | Race | Repose | Society | Society |

James Madison

A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species; where arbitrary tax invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied by an unfeeling policy as another spur; in violation of that sacred property which heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.

Government | Heaven | Labor | Man | Policy | Property | Repose | Reward | Sacred | Security | Government |

John Ruskin

As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite - variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite - energy. It is not the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.

Beauty | Capability | Energy | Nothing | Repose | Right | Unity |