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

Tryon Edwards

Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.

Morality | Piety | Religion | Spirit |

Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

Always be honest and open in your speech and actions. Don't be sneaky or evasive with anyone. A straight mind is the Bodhimanda.

Morality | People | Religion | Virtue | Virtue | Words | World |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Man | Meaning | Sound | Understanding |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!" That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Need | Search | Suicide | Will |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Only free people can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interest of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Equality | Peace |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.

Equality | Memory | Peace | Right |

Hugh Blair

He who goes no further than bare justice, stops at the beginning of virtue.

Important | Order | Right | Spirit | Truth |

Hugh Blair

Such is the infatuation of self-love, that, though in the general doctrine of the vanity of the world all men agree, yet almost every one flatters himself that his own case is it to be an exception from the common rule.

Good | Sentiment | Simplicity | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

The term nature is used sometimes in a wider, sometimes in a narrower extension. When employed in its most extensive meaning, it embraces the two worlds of mind and matter. When employed in its most restricted signification, it is a synonyme for the latter only, and is then used in contradistinction to the former.

Man | Morality | Personality | Responsibility |

William Godwin

Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error.

Existence | Influence | Man | Men | Morality | Passion | Past | System | Teach | Thinking | Trust | Understanding | Will |

William James

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

Human nature | Nature | Psychology |

William Godwin

Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.

Better | Conduct | Consideration | Family | Father | Improvement | Justice | Justify | Life | Life | Lying | Magic | Man | Sense | Truth | Understanding | Will | Work | Worth | Vice |

William Godwin

What... can be more shameless than for society to make an example of those whom she has goaded to the breach of order, instead of amending her own institutions which, by straining order into tyranny, produced the mischief?

Conduct | Education | Man | Respect | Thinking | Will | Respect |

William James

For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Life | Life | Morality | Patriotism | Service |

William Morris

A fearful thing stood at the cloister's end and eyed him for a while, then 'gan to wend adown the cloisters, and began again that rattling, and the moan like fiends in pain. And as it came on towards him, with its teeth the body of a slain goat did it tear, the blood whereof in its hot jaws did seethe, and on its tongue he saw the smoking hair; then his heart sank, and standing trembling there, throughout his mind wild thoughts and fearful ran: "some fiend she was," he said, "the bane of man." yet he abode her still, although his blood curdled within him: the thing dropped the goat, and creeping on, came close to where he stood, and raised its head to him and wrinkled throat. Then he cried out and wildly at her smote, shutting his eyes, and turned and from the place ran swiftly, with a white and ghastly face.

Antiquity | Opposition | Thought | Truth | Thought |

William James

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the

Consciousness | Day | Decision | Psychology | Resolution | Struggle | Time | Will | Think |

William (Morley Punshon) McFee

A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.

Learn |

William James

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false. We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself. First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously? And second, ought we to consider the testimony true? I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: — 1. An uneasiness; and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

Mind | Nothing | Power | Sacred | Understand |

William James

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Consciousness | Hypothesis | Metaphysics | Psychology | Soul | Theology | Unity | Work |