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 Makepeace Thackeray

To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings or pervades you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar, if, dying, nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.

Blessings | Character | Famous | Love | Memory | Soul | Sound |

William Graham Sumner

The four great motives which move men to social activity are hunger, love, vanity, and fear of superior powers. If we search out the causes which have moved men to war we find them under each of these motives or interests.

Character | Fear | Hunger | Love | Men | Motives | Search | War |

Robert Southey

The disappointed man turns his thoughts toward a state of existence where his wiser desires may be fixed with the certainty of faith; the successful man feels that the objects which he has ardently pursued fail to satisfy the cravings of an immortal spirit; the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, that he may save his soul alive.

Character | Existence | Faith | Man | Soul | Spirit | Wickedness |

Jeremy Taylor

Right intention is to the actions of a man what the soul is to the body, or the root to the tree.

Body | Character | Intention | Man | Right | Soul |

John P. Webster

The chiefest action for a man of spirit is never to be out of action; the soul was never put into the body to stand still.

Action | Body | Character | Man | Soul | Spirit |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Grand is the seen, the light, to me - grand are the sky and stars, grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, but grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, lighting the slight, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea, (what were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?) More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul! More multiform far - more lasting thou than they.

Character | Earth | Light | Soul | Space | Time |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

The soul is of itself, all verges to it, all has reference to what ensures, all that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence, not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in a day, month, any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of death, but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is just as much as the direct, the spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body, if not more.

Body | Character | Day | Death | Man | Soul | Spirit | Woman |

Berthold Auerbach

Music washes away from the soul the dust of every-day life.

Day | Life | Life | Music | Soul | Wisdom |

William Whewell

A man really looking onward to an immortal life, on whatever grounds, exhibits to us the human soul in an ennobled attitude.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Soul |

Ani NULL

My soul is God, my soul is eternity.

Eternity | God | Soul | Wisdom |

Herman Lincoln Wayland

Show us the man who never makes a mistake and we will show you a man who never makes anything. The capacity for occasional blundering is inseparable from the capacity to bring things to pass.

Capacity | Character | Man | Mistake | Will |

Edwin Percy Whipple

There seem to be some persons, the favorites of fortune and darlings of nature, who are born cheerful. “A star danced” at their birth. It is no superficial visibility, but a bountiful and beneficent soul that sparkles in their eyes and smiles on their lips. Their inborn geniality amounts to genius, the rare and difficult genius which creates sweet and wholesome character, and radiates cheer.

Birth | Character | Fortune | Geniality | Genius | Nature | Soul |