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

Elias Canetti

Is there still a possibility of public truth? The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs. Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.

Life | Life | Truth | Understanding |

William Shakespeare

So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition-- Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one, and crowned with one crest. A Midsummer Night's Dream (Helena at III, ii)

Man | Merit | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong |

Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Grace | Humor | Sympathy | Gossip |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Love renders all of our plans and all of our hopes a gamble

Age | Truth |

Elizabeth Gilbert

If you do not know where you are or what clan you are, how will you find the balance?

Experience | Truth |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But both are equally true.

Enough | Force | Journey | Nature | Regard | Rule | Truth | Universe | Will | Old |

Elizabeth Gilbert

My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, What are your songs about? He replied, Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse.

Body | Energy | Friend | Memory | Order | Truth | Understanding | Writing |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Kalos Kai Agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.

Energy | Memory | Truth | Writing |

Elizabeth Lesser

Spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.

Nature | Search | Truth |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

O Death, O Beyond, Thou art sweet, thou art strange!

Falsehood | Truth |

Elizabeth Lesser

If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us--secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.

Cynicism | Life | Life | Nothing | Religion | Search | Spirituality | Truth |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.

Right | Truth |

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The loves of men but vary in degrees-- they find no new expression for the flame.

Love | Men | Struggle | Truth | Universe |

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

This dream of our youth will fade out as the splendor fades from the skies when the sun sinks to sleep.

Life | Life | Love | Truth |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

How long will the heathens rage?

Truth |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

We are a moderate, pragmatic people, more comfortable with practice than theory.

Counsel | Inspiration | Truth | Counsel |

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

But now I know that there is no killing a thing like Love, for it laughs at Death. There is no hushing, there is no stilling that which is part of your life and breath. You may bury it deep, and leave behind you the land, the people that knew your slain; it will push the sods from its grave, and find you on wastes of water or desert plain.

Sin | Truth |

Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

Value is given to our little limited lives. Our days are reckoned as movements in the sweep of the centuries. Their faint note belongs to the ocean of song to which worlds and ages have contributed. Our doings help and hinder, spread or retard, the pulsations of the universe's heart. We are a part of the eternities and have a part to play in their orchestrated symphonic movement.

Energy | Philosophy | Sense | Truth |

Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

This is the final test of the truth or untruth of a constructive or disintegrating philosophy of life. What increases man's sense of power, and therefore, for him, the content of life, is true. What tends to the diminishing of the store of moral resiliency and of the energy needed for resisting as well as for onward pushing is corrupting, and therefore marked by falsehood's taint.

Future | Instinct | Man | Need | Truth |