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

Berthold Auerbach

There is no greatness that does not rest on true morality.

Character | Greatness | Morality | Rest |

Charles Kendall Adams

No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.

Character | Distinction | Excellence | Greatness | Success | Wisdom | Excellence |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

A man's true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent self-examinations, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to be right, without troubling himself about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not that which he thinks and says and does.

Character | Consciousness | Greatness | Life | Life | Man | Obedience | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Rule | Self | Think |

François Bourgoing

The aim and end of prayer is to revere, to recognize and to adore the sovereign majesty of God, through what he is in Himself rather than what he is in regard to us, and rather to love his goodness by the love of that goodness itself than for what it sends us.

Character | God | Love | Prayer | Regard |

William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker

Your greatness is measured by your kindness - Your education and intellect by your modesty - Your ignorance is betrayed by your suspicions and prejudices - Your real caliber is measured by the consideration and tolerance you have for others.

Character | Consideration | Education | Greatness | Ignorance | Kindness | Modesty | Intellect |

Christian Nestell Bovee

Honesty is not only “the first step towards greatness” - it is greatness itself.

Character | Greatness | Honesty |

Yosef Leib Bloch, fully R' Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch

Try to become as great as you can. Some people are afraid to accomplish because they might make mistakes and those mistakes will be more serious than if they remained simple. This is not valid reasoning. Each person is obligated to develop himself to the best of his ability. The smallest person has potential for greatness if he utilizes all that is within him.

Ability | Character | Greatness | People | Will | Afraid |

Max Brod

The greatness of a nation does not depend on the character of its blood or race... [but] consists of the values it produces.

Character | Greatness | Race |

Jeremy Collier

Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature.

Character | Envy | Force | Good nature | Good | Health | Malice | Meanness | Nature | Prosperity | Spirit | Wants | Wishes | Happiness |

William Ellery Channing

The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution, who resists the sorest temptations from within and without, who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully, who is calmest in storms and most fearless under menace and frowns, whose reliance on truth, on virtue, on God, is most unfaltering. I believe this greatness to be most common among the multitude, whose names are never heard.

Character | God | Greatness | Man | Resolution | Right | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

William Cobbett

It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.

Character | Greatness | Man | Means | Wants |

Euripedes NULL

Goodness can be taught, and any man who knows what goodness is knows evil too, because he judges from the good.

Character | Evil | Good | Man |

William Cowper

Wisdom and Goodness are twin born, one heart must hold both sister, never seen apart.

Character | Heart | Wisdom |

Euripedes NULL

That man is happiest who lives from day to day and asks no more, garnering the simple goodness of a life.

Character | Day | Life | Life | Man |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sin writes history; goodness is silent.

Character | History | Sin |

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, born Margaret Power

One of the almost numberless advantages of goodness is, that it blinds its possessor to many of those faults in others which could not fail to be detected by the morally defective. A consciousness of unworthiness renders people extremely quick-sighted in discerning the vices of their neighbors; as person scan easily discover in others the symptoms of those diseases beneath which they themselves have suffered.

Character | Consciousness | People |

Henry Giles

How mysterious in this human life, with all its diversities of contrast and compensation; this web of checkered destinies,; this sphere of manifold allotment, where man lives in his greatness and grossness, a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the brutes.

Angels | Character | Compensation | Contrast | Greatness | Life | Life | Little | Man |