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 Ralph Inge

As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.

Character | Heart | Man |

David Hume

The worst speculative skeptic ever I knew was a much better man than the most superstitious devotee and bigot.

Better | Character | Man | Skeptic |

Pinchos Hurwitz

A large amount of physical pain and suffering is caused by one’s thoughts and behaviors. The desire for food causes people to overeat and consume food that is harmful to their health. Envy, anger, and honor-seeking lead to diseases of the heart, high blood pressure, nervous tension and excessive stress. Moreover, even when you pain is basically caused by physical symptoms, your mental attitude towards the pain can greatly increase or decrease the actual amount of suffering you experience. The pain you suffer from illnesses and injuries is frequently more psychological than physical. A person who learns to master a calm and serene attitude towards life trains himself to tolerate physical pain and the actual suffering is greatly lessened.

Anger | Character | Desire | Envy | Experience | Health | Heart | Honor | Life | Life | Pain | People | Suffering |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The relationship between moral action and spiritual knowledge is circular, as it were, and reciprocal. Selfless behavior makes possible an accession of knowledge, and the accession of knowledge makes possible the performance of further and more genuinely selfless actions, which in their turn enhance the agent’s capacity for knowing... A man undertakes right action (which includes, of course, right consciousness and right meditation), and this enables him to catch a glimpse of the Self that underlies his separate individuality. Having seen his own self as the Self, he becomes selfless (and therefore acts selflessly) and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned.

Action | Behavior | Capacity | Character | Consciousness | Individuality | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Meditation | Relationship | Right | Self | Virtue | Virtue |

Bruce Van Horn

One of the most important trips a man can make is that involved in meeting the other half way.

Character | Important | Man |

L. Ron Hubbard, fully Lafayette Ron Hubbard

A man who is willing to accept restriction and barriers and is not afraid of them is free. A man who does nothing but fight restrictions and barriers will usually be trapped.

Character | Man | Nothing | Will | Afraid |

William James

I [have] often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one.

Argument | Character | Existence | Life | Life | Man |

Anna Jameson

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

Character | Courage | Man | Mind | Poverty | Struggle |

Gerald White Johnson

No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.

Character | Man | Responsibility | Right | Time |

Trevor Huddleston

We are created by God for union with Himself... That’s really the meaning of heaven too: fulfillment, wholeness... Though no man has seen God, we have to learn how to love God through loving one another.

Character | Fulfillment | God | Heaven | Love | Man | Meaning | Wholeness | God | Learn |

David Hume

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Universe |

John James Ingalls

Every man is the center of a circle, whose fatal circumference he can not pass.

Character | Man | Wisdom |

Juan Ramón Jimenez, fully Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

Character | Desire | Haste | Life | Life | Means | Right | Time |

Maria Jane Jewsbury

Love is the purification of the heart from self; it strengthens and ennobles the character; gives higher motive and nobler aim to every action of life, and makes both man and woman strong, noble, and courageous. The power to love truly and devotedly is the nobles gift with which a human being can be endowed; but it is a sacred fire that must not be burned to idols.

Action | Character | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Power | Sacred | Self | Woman |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Character | Man |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

The more a man denies himself, the more he shall obtain from God.

Character | God | Man |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.

Cause | Character | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Wrong |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.

Character | Man | Wise | Govern |

William Dean Howells

The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.

Character | Man |