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

Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future.

Laughter |

Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

I do not want to make teaching films. If I did, I would create a separate organization. It is not higher education that interests me so much as general mass education.

Fun | Joy | Laughter | Child |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Choose independence rather than dependence.

Laughter |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

It is impossible to spoil a child under the age of eighteen months with too much love and attention.

Anger | Laughter |

Washington Irving

How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.

Good | Humor | Laughter | Companionship |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

Children | Laughter | People | Child |

Wendell Berry

In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.

Beauty | Church | Day | Family | Good | Heaven | Laughter | Leisure | People | Present | Religion | Speech | Thought | Wickedness | Work | World | Beauty | Old | Think | Thought |

Wendell Berry

Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

Laughter |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.

Contempt | Looks | Self | Sense | Soul | World |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.

Contempt | Ideals | Looks | Revelation | Self | Sense | Soul | Strength | World |

Wallace Stevens

My father's father, his father's father, his— shadows like winds go back to a parent before thought, before speech, at the head of the past.

Laughter | Rhetoric |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

It would have been better to stay in the Paradise of Eldorado instead of returning to this accursed Europe. How right you are, my dear Martin! Everything is illusion and calamity!

Contempt | Eternal | Little |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.

Contempt | Cultivation | Literature | Reward |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing as fine for putting an atmosphere round things. Carmine is the red of wine and is warm and lively like wine. The same goes for emerald green too. It's false economy to dispense with them, with those colors. Cadmium as well.

Better | Laughter | Friends |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing, I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser's shop taking up only so much space.

Action | Contempt | Harm | Men | Thought | Thought | Understand |

Victor Hugo

So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent.

Appearance | Contempt | Conversation | Ends | Past | Pity | Old |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The river of human life meanders along, through many a valley, leaps over many a cliff, loses itself in many a marsh and seeks to empty itself in the ocean of Divine Grace; though, what happens is that it falls into the undrinkable expanse of salt.

Cause | Contempt | Riches | Sloth | Riches |

Thucydides NULL

But as the power of Hellas grew, and the acquisition of wealth became more an objective, the revenues of the states increasing, tyrannies were established almost everywhere.

Contempt | Enemy | Prudence | Prudence |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one].

Bitterness | Business | Capacity | Conduct | Distinction | Laughter | Love | Pride | Suffering | Tears | World | Youth | Youth | Business |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

Aptitude | Conscience | Contempt | Conversation | Freedom | Memory | Talent |