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

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

Life | Life | Nothing | Truth | World |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

I am so far from being a pessimist... on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.

People | Will | World |

Eudora Welty

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

People | Religion | Soul | World | Think |

Eudora Welty

Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

Challenge | Children | Cost | Enough | Good | Love | Mind | Mother | Time | World |

Eudora Welty

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

Character | Good | Pleasure | Speech | Thought | World | Think | Thought |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

If one is a philosopher, he can do nothing else than philosophize; or, if he does something else, he will do it with a view to securing the freedom he needs for philosophizing.

Reason | World |

Eudora Welty

To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone.

World |

Eugene Peterson

Forgiveness is the last word. I take no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table.

Attention | Focus | People | Will | World | Wrong |

Eugene Peterson

It is uncommonly difficult to stay centered and absorbed on our primary life-affirming, life witnessing work. We continue to perform the vast array of activities in work and conversation that I’ve listed, and more than that. but we are also under the continual threat of death, of becoming disconnected from life and people and god and just going through the biological motions – mouthing clichés and not participating in life itself.

World |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed.

Appreciation | Capacity | Chance | Cunning | Enough | Nothing | Soul | Vision | World | Appreciation |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ...Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

Age | Duty | History | War | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

Care | Life | Life | People | Public | World |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization.

Courage | Hell | History | Labor | Men | Need | Spirit | Struggle | Time | Will | World | Writing |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Mardonius was more fond of me than I was of him. That always gives one an advantage.

Literature | Virtue | Virtue | World |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The African is here and to stay. How came he to our shores? Ask your grandfathers, Mr. Anonymous, and if they will tell the truth you will or should blush for the crimes.

Labor | Mission | Power | Public | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.

World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The behavior of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Good | Little | Past | Present | Thought | World | Thought |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.

Good | Human race | People | Race | Regard | Religion | System | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.

Objectivity | Opinion | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.

Important | Life | Life | Object | World |