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

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.

Absolute | Action | Feelings | Impression | Judgment | Man | Reason | Sacred | Sense | Understanding | Intellect |

Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle

There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.

Action | Means | System | Time | Leader |

William James

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

Action | Control |

William James

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

Consciousness | Existence | Nature |

William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters

The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.

Action | Happiness |

William James

It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.

Consciousness | Perception | Psychology | Sense |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

In our natural body every part has a necessary sympathy with every other, and all together form, by their harmonious conspiration, a healthy whole.

Consciousness | Knowledge |

William James

We [may] answer the question: Why is snow white? by saying, For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white—in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

Action |

William James

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Absolute | Body | Conscience | Consciousness | Education | Energy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Meaning | Miracles | Present | Religion | Science | World | God | Think |

William James

That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.

Consciousness | Ideals | Regard | World |

William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

Church | Consciousness | Dignity | Eternal | Little | Past | Salvation | Soul | Theology | Old |

William James

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

Attention | Consciousness | Object | Peculiarity |

William James

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

Consciousness | Mind | Suppression |

William James

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Consciousness | Mistake |

William James

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

Action | Emotions | Reason |

William James

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the

Consciousness | Day | Decision | Psychology | Resolution | Struggle | Time | Will | Think |

William James

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Consciousness | Education | Life | Life | Meaning | Present | World |

William Matthews

Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward.

Action | Choice | Freedom |

William Matthews

If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

Action | Experience | Poetry | Thought | Thought |

William James

Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.

Action | Character | Habit |