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 Blake

The voice of the Devil. All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors: 1. That man has two real existing principles; vis; a body and a soul. 2. That energy, called evil, is alone from body, and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul. 3. That God will torment man in eternity for the following energies. But the following contraries to these are true: 1. Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of the soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is bound or outward circumference of energy. 3. Energy is eternal delight.

Age | Body | Character | Devil | Energy | Eternal | Eternity | Evil | God | Good | Life | Life | Man | Principles | Reason | Sacred | Soul | Will | Following | God |

Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL

All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of he who draws the carriage.

Character | Evil | Man | Pain | Thought |

Yosef Leib Bloch, fully R' Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch

Young people imagine there is great value in fame. Those with life experience know that in truth publicity is extremely short-lived. The nature of the world is that every piece of news makes an impression for only a very short time. After those few minutes the impression is erased and quickly forgotten. It is as if it never was.

Character | Experience | Fame | Impression | Life | Life | Nature | News | People | Time | Truth | World | Value |

Alice Cary

True worth is in being, not seeming.

Character | Worth |

Thomas Chalmers

The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system, a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include al the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities, and indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences.

Character | Experiment | Ignorance | Indolence | Love | Mind | Nature | Observation | Phenomena | Prejudice | Repose | Simplicity | System | Understanding | Will |

William Ellery Channing

The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people’s energy, intellect and virtues.

Character | Energy | Freedom | People | Worth | Intellect |

Susan Fenimore Cooper, fully Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accidents than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Character | Events | History | Reason | Wisdom |

Chayim of Volozhin, also Chaim ben Yuitzchok of Volozhin or Chaim Ickovits NULL

When you suffer yourself, it is easier to feel the suffering of others.

Character | Suffering |

J. J. de Chenier

What is virtue? Reason in practice.

Character | Practice | Reason | Virtue | Virtue |

Jeremy Collier

What can be more honorable than to have courage enough to execute the commands of reason and conscience, to maintain the dignity of our nature, and the station assigned us?

Character | Conscience | Courage | Dignity | Enough | Nature | Reason |

Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

True compassion is utterly neutral and is moved by suffering of every sort, not tied to right and wrong, attachment and aversion.

Character | Compassion | Right | Suffering | Wrong |

James Fenimore Cooper

A true history of human events would show a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Accident | Character | Events | History | Reason |

Jeremy Collier

There are few things reason can discover with so much certainty and ease as its own insufficiency.

Character | Reason | Wisdom |

Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL

You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.

Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |

Fred Pierce Corson

If we think of life as a journey and consider it to be the opportunity for getting from where we are to where we want to be, we will have a working rule that provides us with both a purpose and expanding possibilities for our lives.

Character | Journey | Life | Life | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Rule | Will | Think |

William Ellery Channing

I see nothing worth living for but the divine virtue which endures and surrenders all things for truth, duty, and mankind.

Character | Duty | Mankind | Nothing | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Worth |