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

Thomas Hobbes

By this we may understand, there be two sorts of knowledge, whereof the one is nothing else but sense, or knowledge original (as I have said at the beginning of the second chapter), and remembrance of the same; the other is called science or knowledge of the truth of propositions, and how things are called, and is derived from understanding.

Books | Life | Life | Man | Mankind | Mind | Peace | Qualities | Repose | Old |

Thomas Jefferson

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

Good | Nothing | People | Safe | Thought | Thought |

Thomas Jefferson

I will not say that public life is the line for making a fortune. But it furnishes a decent and honorable support, and places one's children on good grounds for public favor.

Enemy | Evil |

Thomas Hughes

Gaming finds a man a cully, and leaves him a knave.

Day | Good | Hope | Strength |

Thomas Jefferson

A government regulating itself by what is wise and just for the many, uninfluenced by the local and selfish views of the few who direct their affairs, has not been seen, perhaps, on earth. Or if it existed for a moment at the birth of ours, it would not be easy to fix the term of its continuance. Still, I believe it does exist here in a greater degree than anywhere else; and for its growth and continuance... I offer sincere prayers.

Government | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.

Liberty |

Thomas Jefferson

Agriculture, manufactures, commerce and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Protection from casual embarrassments, however, may sometimes be seasonably interposed.

Better | Body | Defense | Land | Nature | Opinion | Service | Thought | Will | Thought |

Thomas Jefferson

In case of an abuse of the delegated powers, the members of the General Government, being chosen by the people, a change by the people would be the constitutional remedy.

God | Justice | Labor | Man | Means | Nature | People | Revolution | Thought | Will | God | Thought |

Thomas Jefferson

The abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.

Commerce | Peace | Present | Society | World | Society | Commerce |

Thomas Jefferson

The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.

Better | Force | Guidance | Man | Sense | Will | Guidance |

Thomas Jefferson

One precedent in favor of power is stronger than an hundred against it.

Change | Evidence | God | Men | Nothing | Religion | World | God |

Thomas Jefferson

The solitude in which we are left by the death of our friends is one of the great evils of protracted life. When I look back to the days of my youth, it is like looking over a field of battle. All, all dead! and ourselves left alone midst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.

Thomas Jefferson

Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, the people, if well informed, may be relied on to set them to rights.

Earth | Labor | Man | Property |

Thomas Jefferson

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain.

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

Sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it’s all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.

Assertion | Little | Mathematics | Men | Right | Talking |

Thomas Merton

It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as new men…We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.

Bible | Peace | People | Work | Bible | Think |

Thomas Merton

The contemplative is the man not who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist.

Effort | Important | Temptation | Thought | Temptation | Thought |

Thomas Paine

But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and band, the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.

Evidence | Good | Public | Reason | Rest | Will | World | Child |

Thomas Paine

It was needless, after this, to say that all was vanity and vexation of spirit; for it is impossible to derive happiness from the company of those whom we deprive of happiness.

Force | Law | Thought | Thought |

Thomas Tickell

The babbling sounds that mimic echo plays, The fairy shade, and its eternal maze? Nature and Art in all their charms combin'd, And all Elysium to one view confin'd!

Age | Beauty | Books | Children | Cost | Credit | Day | Disdain | Example | Glory | Grace | Heaven | Hope | Kill | Little | Love | Marriage | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Thought | Time | Truth | Wants | Waste | Wisdom | Beauty | Old | Thought |