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

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A poor original is better than a good imitation.

Office | People | Problems | Friends |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The world's male chivalry has perished out, but women are knights-errant to the last; and, if Cervantes had been greater still, he had made his Don a Donna.

Love | World | Friends |

Dorothy Parker

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

Present | Friends |

Elyn Saks

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Important | People | Sense | Work | Friends |

Elyn Saks

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Family | Law | Nothing | People | Public | Safe | Stigma | Work | Friends |

Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

My life closed twice before its close; it yet remains to see if Immortality unveil a third event to me, so huge, so hopeless to conceive, as these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

Avarice | Forgive | Friends |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

Her position before was sheltered from the light: now, I had a distinct view of her whole figure and countenance. She was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood: an admirable form, and the most exquisite little face that I have ever had the pleasure of beholding: small features, very fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck; and eyes — had they been agreeable in expression, they would have been irresistible.

Friends |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright unclouded day.

Change | Courage | Day | Dignity | Father | Good | Heart | Little | Mother | Will | Friends | Learn | Think |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

With wide-embracing love Thy Spirit animates eternal years, pervades and broods above, changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. Though earth and moon were gone, and suns and universes ceased to be, and Thou wert left alone, every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death, nor atom that his might could render void: Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, and what Thou art may never be destroyed.

Change | Friends | Learn |

Emmet Fox

Remember that God is always at the end of the road ahead, but at the end of the road behind you will only find yourself.

Circumstances | Destiny | Good | Happy | Health | Present | Prosperity | Friends |

Emmet Fox

Treat the "Because" when you find yourself thinking that your Prayer cannot be answered for any reason whatever - treat that reason. When something says to you that you cannot demonstrate "because" - treat the because. When you think, I cannot demonstrate because I have not enough understanding - treat for understanding. When you think, I cannot treat because I have a Headache - treat the headache. When you think, I cannot demonstrate because I am full of doubts - treat the doubts. When you think I cannot demonstrate because it is now too late - treat against the time illusion. When you think, I cannot demonstrate in this part of the country - treat against the space illusion. When you think, I cannot demonstrate this thing because of my age - treat your age belief. When you think, I cannot demonstrate because someone else will hinder me - treat the belief in a power other than God. No matter what name the because may give itself, it is still your belief in limitation. Be loyal to God and know that He and He alone has all power. Treat the because.

Freedom | Ideas | Important | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Need | Power | Present | Prosperity | Right | Soul | Teach | Work | Friends |

Emmet Fox

Success and happiness are the natural condition of mankind. It is actually easier for us to demonstrate these things than the reverse. Bad habits of thinking and acting may obscure this fact for a time, just as a wrong way of walking or sitting, or holding a pen or a musical instrument may seem to be easier than the proper way, because we have accustomed ourselves to it; but the proper way is the easier nevertheless.

Life | Life | Man | Power | Sense | Truth | Will | Woman | Friends |

Esther Baldwin York

It Depends on Us... Another year lies before us like an unwritten page, an unspent coin, an unwalked road. How the pages will read, what treasures will be.

Adventure | Force | Need | Friends |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

If life is a bowl of cherries, then what am I doing in the pits?

Chance | Children | Day | Earth | God | Life | Life | Light | Love | Time | God | Friends |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super-sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

Church | Parents | Will | Friends |

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

"When an alluring woman comes in at the door," warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, "discretion may be found up the chimney". It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: "The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly."

Bitterness | Friends |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you.

Friend | Little | Time | Will | Friends |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

Friends |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it's wrong or not, I'm beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, "It's existential." He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.

Man | Friends |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Foolish and vain indeed is the workingman who makes the color of his skin the stepping-stone to his imaginary superiority. The trouble is with his head, and if he can get that right he will find that what ails him is not superiority but inferiority, and that he, as well as the Negro he despises, is the victim of wage-slavery, which robs him of what he produces and keeps both him and the Negro tied down to the dead level of ignorance and degradation.

Struggle | Friends |