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

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

The principal reason for sex deification is loss of belief in God. Once men lose God, they lose the purpose of life; and when the purpose of living is forgotten, the universe becomes meaningless. Man then tries to forget his emptiness in the intensity of a momentary experience.

Belief | Character | Experience | God | Life | Life | Man | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Universe | Loss |

Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL

The purpose of food is to relieve hunger and thirst, not to minister to caprice and luxury.

Character | Hunger | Luxury | Purpose | Purpose |

William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell

It is wonderful what strength of purpose and boldness and energy of will are roused by the assurance that we are doing our duty.

Boldness | Character | Duty | Energy | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Will |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

Self-expression can be wrong as well as right... When self-expression is identified with irrational surrender to lower instincts, it ends by making the person a slave to those passions. Self-denial is not a renunciation of freedom; it is rather the taming of what is savage and base in our nature for what is higher and better. It is a release from imprisonment by our lusts and passions.

Better | Character | Ends | Freedom | Nature | Right | Self | Self-denial | Surrender | Wrong |

Sherwood Anderson

A man needs a purpose for real health.

Health | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time.

Acceptance | Beauty | Belief | Character | Desire | Existence | Faith | God | Health | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Beauty | God | Poem | Thought | Understand |

Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Character | Inferiority | Man | Right | Superiority | Wrong |