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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

With most people, doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.

Belief | Character | Doubt | People |

James Russell Lowell

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.

Character | Memory | Study | Will | Work |

Thomas C. Murphy

The man who is a drunkard has no intellectual freedom. Science declares that alcohol seeks the intellectual faculties, clogs the brain cells, distorts the reason, vitiates the mind, shatters the nerve centres, and he who is diseased with inebriety cannot enjoy intellectual freedom.

Character | Freedom | Man | Mind | Reason | Science |

George S. Merriam

That belief which inspires a man to higher life, which moves him to trample down his besetting sins, to help his weaker brother, to rise into communion with God, is to him a Divine voice.

Belief | Character | God | Life | Life | Man |

National Commission on Excellence in Education NULL

Help your children understand that excellence in education cannot be achieved without intellectual and moral integrity coupled by hard work and commitment.

Character | Children | Commitment | Education | Excellence | Integrity | Work | Excellence | Understand |

William Lyon Phelps

One of the secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute.

Character | Curiosity | Life | Life |

Plotinus NULL

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever in the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Beauty | Body | Character | Life | Life | Order | Self | Soul |

Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Belief | Character | Chastity | Lying | Man | Infidelity | Happiness |

William Lyon Phelps

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.

Belief | Character | Fallacy | Life | Life | Time | Youth | Youth |

Joseph Parker

No true manhood can be trained by a merely intellectual process. You cannot train men by the intellect alone; you must train them by the heart.

Character | Heart | Men | Intellect |

Plotinus NULL

It is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state.

Character | Conduct | Morality | Nature | Right | Soul |

Nicholas Rescher

Reason itself... demands that we recognize the limited place of the virtues of cognition, inquiry, and the cerebral side of life. An adequate account of rationality must rightly stress its importance and primacy while recognizing that the intellectual virtues are only limited components of the good life.

Character | Good | Inquiry | Life | Life | Rationality | Reason |