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

William James

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Fulfillment | Perfection |

William James

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.

Eternal | Greatness | History | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Truth | Work | World |

William Law

There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.

Behavior | Death | Nature | Nothing | Perfection | Safe |

William Law

If [we] have no chosen the kingdom of God [first], it will make in the end no difference what [we] have chosen instead.

Desire | Life | Life | Nothing | Perfection |

William Law

Piety requires us to renounce no ways of life where we can act reasonably, and offers what we do to the glory of God.

Perfection | Piety | Pleasure | Progress | Reality | Reason | Receive | Religion | Wonder |

William Law

Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.

God | Happy | Life | Life | Perfection | Purity | Will | God | Happiness |

William Law

We can all call to mind movements which have begun as pure upsurges of fresh spiritual vitality, breaking through and revolting against the hardened structure of the older body, and claiming, in the name of the Spirit, liberty from outward forms and institutions. And we have seen how rapidly they develop their own forms, their own structures of thought, of language, and of organization. It would surely be a very unbiblical view of human nature and history to think -- as we so often, in our pagan way, do -- that this is just an example of the tendency of all things to slide down from a golden age to an age of iron, to identify the spiritual with the disembodied, and to regard visible structure as equivalent to sin. We must rather recognize here a testimony to the fact that Christianity is, in its very heart and essence, not a disembodied spirituality, but life in a visible fellowship, a life which makes such total claim upon us, and so engages our total powers, that nothing less than the closest and most binding association of men with one another can serve its purpose.

Firmness | Grief | Life | Life | Perfection | Pious | Poverty | Pride | Strength | Weakness | Will |

William Shakespeare

ORSINO: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, more longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, than women's are… For women are as roses, whose fair flow'r being once display'd doth fall that very hour. VIOLA: And so they are; alas, that they are so! To die, even when they to perfection grow!

Perfection |

William Shakespeare

ORSINO: How dost thou like this tune? VIOLA: It gives a very echo to the seat where love is throned.

Perfection | Praise |

William Shakespeare

Open as day for melting charity.

Change | Love | Perfection |

Edwin Percy Whipple

The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

Action | Greatness |

William Shakespeare

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Boys | Day | Glory | Good | Greatness | Hate | Heart | Hope | Little | Man | Mercy | Pride | Smile | Old |

William Shakespeare

Some book there is that she desires to see. Which is it, girl, of these? Open them, boy. But thou art deeper read and better skilled: Come and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow, till the heavens reveal the damned contriver of this deed. Titus Andronicus (Titus at IV, i)

Greatness | Will |

William Shakespeare

So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

Business | Cause | Day | Death | Duty | Father | God | Greatness | Guilt | Law | Life | Life | Man | Men | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Sin | Soul | Teach | Time | War | Business | God | Guilty | Think |

Elizabeth Gilbert

We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we'll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there's no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don't at least marginally understand our home.

Ego | Fortune | Life | Life | Mind | Perfection | Right | Silence |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

Ego | Mind | Perfection | Silence |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness, Round our restlessness His rest.

Greatness | Life | Life | Think |