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

Henry Giles

It should be the work of a genuine and noble patriotism to raise the life of the nation to the level of its privileges; to harmonize its general practice with its abstract principles; to reduce to actual facts the ideals of its institutions; to elevate instruction into knowledge; to deepen knowledge into wisdom; to render knowledge and wisdom complete in righteousness; and to make the love of country perfect in the love of man.

Abstract | Ideals | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Man | Patriotism | Practice | Principles | Righteousness | Wisdom | Work | Instruction |

Kurt Gödel, also Goedel

I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future.

Confidence | Future | Intuition | Meaning | Perception | Question | Reason | Sense | Theories | Will | Wisdom |

Robert Hutchins, fully Robert Maynard Hutchins

Education is not to teach men facts, theories or laws, not to reform or amuse them or make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellect, teach them to think straight, if possible, but to think nevertheless.

Education | Men | Reform | Teach | Theories | Wisdom | Think |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Education | Learning | Wisdom |

Randall Jarrell

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

Wisdom |

Claude Levi-Strauss

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Character | Language | Means | Music | Wisdom |

Walter Lippmann

True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

Ideas | Little | Wisdom |

John Leslie "J. L." Mackie

Our problem is that once we have accepted an irreducible distinction between mental and physical facts and properties, and have allowed that physical facts and properties constitute sufficient causes of actions, we seem to be forced to admit that mental facts and properties are epiphenomenal, causally idle; yet this conclusion is itself implausible.

Distinction | Wisdom |

Cynthia Ozick

I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers, they are gossips.

Fallacy | Ideas | Mind | Mistake | People | Thinkers | Wisdom | Afraid |

C. P. Scott, fully Charles Prestwich Scott

Comment is free, but facts are sacred.

Sacred | Wisdom |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over.

Enough | God | Irony | Man | Wisdom |

Francis Wayland

That the truths of the Bible have the power of awakening an intense moral feeling in every human being; that they make bad men good, and send a pulse of healthful feeling through all the domestic, civil, and social relations; that they teach men to love right, and hate wrong, and seek each other's welfare as children of a common parent; that they control the baleful passions of the heart, and thus make men proficient in self-government; and finally that they teach man to aspire after conformity to a being of infinite holiness, and fill him with hopes more purifying, exalted, and suited to his nature than any other book the world has ever known - these are facts as incontrovertible as the laws of philosophy, or the demonstrations of mathematics.

Awakening | Bible | Children | Conformity | Control | Good | Government | Hate | Heart | Love | Man | Mathematics | Men | Nature | Philosophy | Power | Right | Self | Teach | Wisdom | World | Wrong | Bible | Truths |

Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

Reality | Spirit |

Edward Hallet "Ted" Carr

Progress in history is achieved through the interdependence and interaction of facts and values. The objective historian is the historian who penetrates most deeply into this reciprocal process.

History | Progress |

Joyce Brothers

Trust your hunches. They’re usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.

Trust |

Joyce Brothers

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery. Trust your hunches. They’re usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.

Flattery | Imitation | Listening | Trust |