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

Stephen Hawking

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

Cause | Change | Influence | Means | Time | Will | Trouble |

Stephen Hawking

There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?

Giving |

Stephen Wolfram

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.

Aphorism | Mind |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

We can have no '50-50' allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

Adversity | Fortune | Good | Men | Time |

Thomas Hardy

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Thomas Hobbes

Emulation is grief arising from seeing one’s self exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him, in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill fortune that may befall him.

Battle | Inclination | Man | Men | Nature | Power | Time | War | Will |

Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL

This new year makes it fifty suddenly gone. Thinking of life’s steady return to rest cuts deep, driving me to spend all morning wandering. Skies clear, air’s breath fresh, I sit with friends beside this stream flowing far away. Striped bream weave gentle currents; calling gulls drift above idle valleys. Eyes roaming distant waters, I find ridge above ridge: it’s nothing like majestic nine-fold immortality peaks, but to reverent eyes it’s incomparable. Taking the winejar, I pour a round, and we start offering brimful toasts: who knows where today might lead or if all this will ever come true again. After a few cups, my heart’s far away, and I forget thousand-year sorrows: ranging to the limit of this morning’s joy, it isn’t tomorrow I’m looking for.

Heart | Think |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Once giving way to tears, she wept bitterly for all that she had lost, and all that she must lose so soon. Her mother had had the courage to leave everything she loved and to come out here with her father; she in turn ought to show just that same courage about going back, but she could not find it in her heart.

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of Paradise Lost was as mythical as the Odyssey; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man.

Life | Life | Old |

Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

It's undesirable for the international community to link the issue of bear farming with other issues.

Heaven |

Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

Problems | Learn |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Keep a corner of your mind focused exclusively on your images of prosperity.

Power |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Hope | Journey | Reason | Old |

Wallace Stevens

It was a flourishing tropic he required for his refreshment, an abundant zone, prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious, yet with a harmony not rarefied nor fined for the inhibited instruments of over-civil stops.

Wallace Stevens

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Belief | Nothing | Self |

Wallace Stevens

It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.

Day | Time | Woman | Words |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Nothing | Phenomena | Search | Sense | Thought | Wrong | Think | Thought |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Desire | Time | Truth | Will |

Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer

Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.

Looks |