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

Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL

No sin is too big for God to pardon, and none is too small for habit to magnify.

God | Habit | Pardon | Sin | God |

Blaise Pascal

Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents.

Desire | Nature | Reason | Sin |

Charles Caleb Colton

Love is an alliance of friendship and animalism; if the former predominates it is passion exalted and refined; if the latter, gross and sensual.

Love | Passion | Friendship |

Bonnell Thornton

True repentance consists in the heart being broken for sin and broken from sin. Some often repent, yet never reform; they resemble a man traveling in a dangerous path, who frequently starts and stops, but never turns back.

Heart | Man | Reform | Repentance | Sin |

Charles Caleb Colton

The slightest sorrow for sin is sufficient if it produce amendment, and the greatest insufficient if it do not.

Sin | Sorrow |

Christopher Marlowe

There is no sin but ignorance.

Ignorance | Sin |

C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family

I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else.

Sin | Think |

Claude Bernard

The nature or very essence of phenomena, whether vital or mineral, will always remain unknown... Absolute knowledge could, therefore, leave nothing outside itself; and only on condition of knowing everything could man be granted its attainment. Man behaves as if he were destined to reach this absolute knowledge; and the incessant why which he puts to nature proves it. Indeed, this hope, constantly disappointed, constantly reborn, sustains and always will sustain successive generation sin the passionate search for truth.

Absolute | Attainment | Hope | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Nothing | Phenomena | Search | Sin | Truth | Will |

Christopher Marlowe

Hell is but the collected ruins of the moral world, and sin is the principle that has made them.

Hell | Sin | World |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

Great souls are not those which have less passion and more virtue than common souls, but only those which have greater designs.

Passion | Virtue | Virtue |

Edmund Burke

‘Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both.

Beginning | Envy | Hell | Life | Life | Passion | Pleasure | Sin | Wants | Will |

Edmund Burke

Next to love sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.

Heart | Love | Passion | Sympathy |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

The passions are the only orators that always persuade; they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.

Art | Man | Passion |

Eric Hoffer

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Ability | Action | Ideas | Men | Motives | Passion | People | Society | Thought | Society | Govern | Thought |

Edward Gibbon

The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day and hour with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.

Day | Enjoyment | Love | Passion | Pleasure | Study |

Eric Hoffer

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

Desire | Passion | Self | Following |

Epicurus NULL

The knowledge of sin is the beginning of salvation.

Beginning | Knowledge | Salvation | Sin |

Federico Fellini

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

Beginning | Life | Life | Passion |