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

Eudora Welty

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

People | Religion | Soul | World | Think |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.

Love | Happiness |

Eudora Welty

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

Character | Good | Pleasure | Speech | Thought | World | Think | Thought |

Eugene Peterson

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.

Dignity | Suffering | Work |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

The kind human gain much that that the virtue was less laborious.

Happiness |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless.

Chance | Fame |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

Heart | Kill | Love | Past | Reading | Time |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.

Business | Will | Writing | Business |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

This is, I say, the time for all good men not to go to the aid of their party, but to come to the aid of their country.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

Important | Object |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.

Words |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The behavior of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Good | Little | Past | Present | Thought | World | Thought |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I came from a guiltless world as far as sex went — the world I grew up in was Southern, Washington and political. Everyone in my world did absolutely everything. I am speaking now of the Thirties. No one I knew denied himself anything. Of course, there was a great deal of care about appearances. People in public life had to be careful.

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.

Time |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We are the United States of amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Time |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.

Important | Life | Life | Object | World |