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

John Locke

Perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds; which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understanding as do from these receive into our understanding as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other sensation, so I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operation within self... These two, I say, vis. external material things, as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of reflection, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings.

Character | Enough | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Mind | Nothing | Perception | Receive | Reflection | Self | Sense | Thinking | Understanding |

Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes

The thought of eternity consoles for the shortness of life.

Character | Eternity | Life | Life | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Colin McGinn

Our concepts of the empirical world are fundamentally controlled by the character of our perceptual experience and by the introspective access we enjoy to our own minds. Thus our concepts of consciousness are constrained by the specific form of our own consciousness, so that we cannot form concepts for quite alien forms of consciousness possessed by other actual and possible creatures. Similarly, our concepts of the body, including the brain, are constrained by the way we perceive these physical objects; we have, in particular, to conceive of them as spatial entities essentially similar to other physical objects in space... But now these two forms of conceptual closure operate to prevent us from arriving at concepts for the property or relation that intelligibly links consciousness to the brain. For, first, we cannot grasp other forms of consciousness, and so we cannot grasp the theory that explains these other forms: that theory must be general, but we must always be parochial in our conception of consciousness. It is as if we were trying for a general theory of light but only could grasp the visible part of the spectrum. And, second, it is precisely the perceptually controlled conception of the brain that we have which is so hopeless in making consciousness an intelligible result of brain activity. No property we can ascribe to the brain on the basis of how it strikes us perceptually, however inferential the ascription, can be the crucible from which subjective consciousness emerges fully formed. That is why the feeling is so strong in us that there has to be something magical about the mind-brain relation.

Body | Character | Consciousness | Experience | Light | Mind | Property | Space | Wisdom | World |

Madame de Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville

If only man could be induced to laugh more they might hate less, and find more serenity here on earth. If they cannot worship together, or accept the same laws, or tolerate the wonderful diversity of thought and behavior and physique with which they have been blessed, at least they can laugh together.

Behavior | Character | Diversity | Earth | Hate | Man | Serenity | Thought | Worship | Thought |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Other passions have objects to flatter the, and seem to content and satisfy them for a while; there is power in ambition, pleasure in luxury, and pelf in covetousness; but envy can gain nothing but vexation.

Ambition | Character | Envy | Luxury | Nothing | Pleasure | Power |

George William McDonald

Instead of a gem or a flower, cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend.

Character | Friend | Heart | Thought | Thought |

Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay

Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.

Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |

Anna Maria Porter

The habit of dissipating every serious thought by a succession of agreeable sensations is as fatal to happiness as to virtue; for when amusement is uniformly substituted for objects of moral and mental interest, we lose all that elevates our enjoyments above the scale of childish pleasures.

Character | Habit | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness | Thought |

John Jason Owen

He that hath slight thought of sin never had great thoughts of God.

Character | God | Sin | Thought | Thought |

William Lyon Phelps

One of the secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute.

Character | Curiosity | Life | Life |

Alexander Pope

What thin partitions sense from thought divide.

Character | Sense | Thought | Thought |

Plotinus NULL

External objects present us only with appearances.

Character | Present |

Francis Quarles

The fountain of beauty is the heart, and every generous thought illustrates the walls of your chamber. If virtue accompanies beauty it is the heart's paradise; if vice be associate with it, it is the soul's purgatory. It is the wise man's bonfire, and the fools furnace.

Beauty | Character | Heart | Man | Paradise | Soul | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wise | Beauty | Thought | Vice |

Andrew W Robertson

Too often we fix our minds almost entirely upon what we are going to get and give no thought at all as to what we are going to give in return.

Character | Thought | Thought |

John Charles Salak

Failures are divided into two classes - those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

Character | Thought | Thought |