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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania, when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank, oh, then diet yourself well on biography - the biography of good and great men.

Diet | Good | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Samuel Smiles

The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.

Inspiration | Lesson | Life | Life | Man | Wisdom |

William Osler, fully Sir William Osler

History is simply the biography of the mind of man.

History | Man | Mind |

David Thomas

Unselfish and noble acts are the most radiant epochs in the biography of souls. When wrought in earliest youth, they lie in the memory of age like the coral islands, green and sunny, amidst the melancholy waste of ocean.

Age | Melancholy | Memory | Waste | Youth |

David Thomas

Unselfish and noble actions are the most radiant pages in the biography of souls.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Fable |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man... and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

History | Man | Worth |

Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

History | Man | Men | World |

Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Psychology |

C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills

The life of an individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which his biography is enacted.

Individual | Life | Life |

Louis L'Amour, fully Louis Dearborn L'Amour

It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

History | Life | Life |

Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

History | Literature | Science |

Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

Love | People | Truth |

Theodor Haecker

The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror.

Man |

Thomas Carlyle

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Man | Waiting | World |

Thomas Carlyle

The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.

History | World |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Little | Man | Nothing | Will | Think |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

Better | Generosity | Life | Life | Little | Lord | Love | Nothing | Passion | Thinking | Truth | Will | Woman | Writing | Think |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

Books | History | People | Poetry |