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

William Godwin

A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, emboweled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.

Future | Good | Happy | Thinking |

William James

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Chance | Character | Emotions | Future | Life | Life | Sensibility | Time |

William Godwin

Neither philosophy, nor morality, nor politics will ever show like itself till man shall be acknowledged for what he really is, a being capable of rectitude, virtue and benevolence, and who needs not always be led to actions of general utility, by foreign and frivolous considerations.

Future | Present | Will |

William James

I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Future | Mankind | Manliness | Mind | Peace | Position | War | Will | Old |

William James

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

Change | Enough | Future | Past | Reality | Will |

William Law

Let a clergyman but intend to please God in all his actions, as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will know that there is nothing noble in a clergyman but a burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poorer in his profession [than] idleness and a worldly spirit.

Future | Means | Nothing | Service | World | Value |

Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

There is no tropical island paradise I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.

Computer | Future | Power | Right |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.

Future | Past | Present |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

Future | Past | Present |

Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

May I recognize all the manifestations that appear to me in the bardo (intermediate state) as being my own projections; emanations of my own mind. When the bardo of the moment of death appears may I abandon attachments and mental fixations, and engage without distraction in the path which the instructions make clear. Mind projected into the sphere of uncreated space, separated from body, from flesh and blood, I will know that which is impermanence and illusion.

Future | Past | Present |

Eileen Garrett

There is a place for each individual in the world, but you must seek and find where your place is and where you fit in. If you are afraid to take the responsibility of bringing in the new, do not try to stop those souls who are willing to do it. Realize that those souls who have been trained and inspired to undertake this task will do so, for it is their work. Find your rightful place in the whole vast plan, and if you are not in the front line do not let it disturb you. Remember, all sorts of people are needed to make up the whole. Simply accept your specific work and do what you know you have to do wholeheartedly, and allow those souls who have been placed in the position of leadership and responsibility to go ahead. Give them your full backing and complete loyalty; they need it and appreciate it. Lift up your heart in deep love praise and gratitude for them, and always give of your very best.

Future | Language | Mind |

Eliza Cook

How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start, when memory plays an old tune on the heart.

Courage | Devotion | Future | Guile | Intrigue | Life | Life | Man | Popularity | Principles | Public | Righteousness | Skill | Youth | Following | Youth | Intellect | Teacher |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have -- women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same. This country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers-that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to the women who've worked all their lives for half wages or no pay.

Family | Future | Government | Men | Government |

Elias Canetti

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Future | Survival | Thought | Thought |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Future | Life | Life | Space | Happiness |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument.

Day | Future | Heart | Love | Lying | Words |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

But you will imagine that it is best that He should at once enable you to see clearly. If it is, you may be sure He will do it. He never makes mistakes. But He often deals far differently with His disciples. He lets them grope their way in the dark until they fully learn how blind they are, how helpless, how absolutely in need of Him. What His methods will be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act.

Future | Good | Majority | People |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing.

Age | Children | Future | God | Parents | Rule | Will | God | Afraid |