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

Richard Cecil

We are too fond of our own will; we want to be doing what we fancy mighty things: but the great point is to do small things, when called to them, in a right spirit.

Character | Right | Spirit | Will |

Henry Clay

In all the affairs of human life, social as well as political, I have remarked that courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest to the grateful and appreciating heart.

Character | Heart | Life | Life |

Henry Van Dyke, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke

A clean and sensitive conscience, a steadfast and scrupulous integrity in small things as well as great, is the most valuable of all possessions, to a nation as to an individual.

Character | Conscience | Individual | Integrity | Possessions |

Humphry Davy, fully Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart, and secure comfort.

Character | Comfort | Heart | Life | Life | Little |

Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler

When working on improving yourself, it is easy to become discouraged because you do not see sufficient progress. Keep trying and do not give up. Every small amount of improvement is a success.

Character | Improvement | Progress | Success |

Tyron Edwards

Deviation from either truth or duty is a downward path, and none can say where the descent will end. "He that despiseth small things shall fall little by little."

Character | Deviation | Duty | Little | Truth | Will |

Stephen Crane

Indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels.

Character | Children | Indifference | Wisdom |

George Crabbe

How often do we sigh for opportunities of doing good, whist we neglect the openings of Providence in little things, which would frequently lead to the accomplishment of most important usefulness!... Good is done by degrees. However small in proportion the benefits which follow individual attempts to do good, a great deal may thus be accomplished by perseverance, even in the midst of discouragements and disappointments.

Accomplishment | Character | Good | Important | Individual | Little | Neglect | Perseverance | Providence | Usefulness |

Dubner Magid, name for Rabbi Jacob ben wolf Krantz

When a person has a large amount of any pleasure, he becomes accustomed to it and no longer feels enjoyment. If, however, a person is only able to obtain a small amount, he greatly appreciates it.

Character | Enjoyment | Pleasure |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless - nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

Character | Speech |

L. G. Elliott, fully Lloyd George Elliott

Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellows. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter.

Action | Character | Men | People | Respect | Wisdom | Respect |

Albert Einstein

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Character | Important | Truth | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

It is in those acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look around with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness, calling their denial knowledge.

Character | Earth | Joy | Knowledge | Men | Waste |

Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler

If a person demands to have everything he wishes, the lack of even a small pleasure can make him feel extremely unhappy. Excessive demands can even lead some people to consider their entire lives as worthless if they are missing some minor pleasure that they arbitrarily demand.

Character | People | Pleasure | Wishes |

Tyron Edwards

The influences of little things are as real, and as constantly about us, as the air we breathe or the light by which we see. These are the small - the often invisible - the almost unthought of strands, which are inweaving and twisting by millions, to bind us to character - to good or evil here, and to heaven or hell hereafter.

Character | Evil | Good | Heaven | Hell | Light | Little |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

A small minority are enabled... to find happiness along the path of love; but far-reaching mental transformations of the erotic function are necessary before this is possible. These people make themselves independent of their object’s acquiescence by transferring the main value from the fact of being loved to their own act of loving; they protect themselves against loss of it by attaching their love not to individual objects but to all men equally, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aim and modifying the instinct which they induce in themselves by this process - an unchangeable, undeviating, tender attitude - has little superficial likeness to the stormy vicissitudes of genital love, from which it is nevertheless derived.

Character | Individual | Instinct | Little | Love | Men | Object | People | Loss | Vicissitudes | Happiness | Value |

Betty Friedan

The blackout of images of women or men visibly over sixty-five, engaged in any vital or productive adult activity, and their replacement by the ‘problem’ of age, is our society’s very definition of age. Age is perceived only as a decline or deterioration from youth.

Age | Character | Men | Society | Youth |

Benjamin Franklin

Wink at small faults - remember thou hast great ones.

Character |