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

Adolfo Barcella

Unrequited love is the meaning of life. We’re here to love but not to be loved, to give but not receive. Our mission in this world is to improve humanity and leave a better history than we found. Only selfless love has such power. Only love without interest or expectation of reward can change human beings... To give love without receiving love is the truest love and brings the greatest happiness there is in life.

Better | Change | Character | Expectation | History | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mission | Power | Receive | Reward | World | Expectation | Happiness |

Simeon ben Azai, sometimes Ben Azai

The reward of doing one duty is the power to do another.

Character | Duty | Power | Reward |

Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith

Agriculture is the noblest of all alchemy; for it turns earth, and even manure, into gold, conferring upon its cultivator the additional reward of health.

Alchemy | Character | Earth | Gold | Health | Reward |

Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.

Character | Honor | Reward |

Edgar Fawcett

The best reward of a kindly deed is the knowledge of having done it.

Character | Knowledge | Reward |

Charles W. Eliot

Don't think too much about yourselves. Try to cultivate the habit of thinking of others; this will reward you. Nourish your minds by good reading, constant reading. Discover what your lifework is, work in which you can do most good, in which you can be happiest. Be unafraid in all things when you know you are in the right.

Character | Good | Habit | Reading | Reward | Right | Thinking | Will | Work | Think |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Character | Duty | Power | Reward |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts is silence, and find his reward in the; exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.

Character | Man | Reward | Silence | Will | Wisdom |

Wu Ming Fu

The effects of our actions may be postponed but they are never lost. There is an inevitable reward for good deeds and an inescapable punishment for bad. Meditate upon this truth, and seek always to earn good wages from Destiny.

Character | Deeds | Destiny | Good | Inevitable | Punishment | Reward | Truth | Deeds |

Henry Fielding

Domestic happiness is the end of almost all our pursuits, and the common reward of all our pains.

Character | Reward | Wisdom | Happiness |

Owen Feltham

Riches, though they may reward virtues, yet they cannot cause them; he is much more noble who deserves a benefit than he who bestows one.

Cause | Character | Reward | Riches |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.

Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |

David Hume

Where is the reward of virtue? and what recompense has nature provided for such important sacrifices as those of life and fortune, which we must often make to it? O sons of earth! Are ye ignorant of the value of this celestial mistress? And do ye meanly inquire for her portion, when ye observe her genuine beauty?

Beauty | Character | Earth | Fortune | Important | Life | Life | Nature | Recompense | Reward | Virtue | Virtue | Value |

John Locke

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.

Character | Evil | Good | Mankind | Motives | Punishment | Reward | Work |

Walter Lippmann

Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

Character | Reward | Virtue | Virtue |

Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act of happiness. It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment; it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul... No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

Character | Contentment | Joy | Life | Life | Reward | Soul |

Israel Salanter Lipkin

Who thinks of reward serves himself, not God.

Character | God | Reward |

Nikita Ivanovich Panin

To seek virtue for the sake of reward is to dig for iron with a spade of gold.

Character | Gold | Reward | Virtue | Virtue |