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

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going to drop?

Art | Children | Mistake | Mother | Respect | Respect | Art |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopianÂ…But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival.

Education | Metaphysics | Present | Soul | World | Understand |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Everybody knows that the butterfly emerges from the pupa, and the pupa from a quite different thing called a larva, and the larva from the butterfly's egg.

Man | Psychology | Sense | Soul |

Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well, replied the Master, where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.

Danger | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Time | Danger |

Eugene Peterson

So the question is not “Am I going to be a part of a community of faith” but “How am I going to live in this community of faith.”

Soul |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

There is evidence that the faculty of reflection will appear as soon as our senses begin to develop, and it is equally true that we have the use of the senses from an early age, just because at an early age we began to reflect.

Distinguish | Error | Fame | Impression | Mistake | Perception |

Eudora Welty

Don't give anybody up. . . or leave anybody out. . . . There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help.--Spoken by Jack to Gloria

Character | Life | Life | Right | Soul |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Our vocal music is so greatly different from our common recitation or declamatory speaking, that the imagination is not easily imposed upon by our musical tragedies.

Appearance | Need | Object | Soul |

Eudora Welty

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

People | Religion | Soul | World | Think |

Eugene Peterson

If we're trying to set education policy, we have to listen to the education experts.

Defeat | Future | Mistake | Nature | Need | Obedience | Organic | Past | Unity | Vision | Will |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Or rather, I inherited the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damned by it, as they say at the race track — damned in more ways than one.

Devil | Hate | Soul |

Eugene Peterson

The only cure for cynicism is to bring it out behind the scenes. It is a parasite on faith. The reason that many of us donÂ’t ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.

Care | Mistake | Thinking |

Eugene Peterson

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.

Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed.

Appreciation | Capacity | Chance | Cunning | Enough | Nothing | Soul | Vision | World | Appreciation |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Soul | Work |