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

François Arago, fully François Jean Dominique Arago

A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it.

Comfort | Common Sense | Estimation | Genius | Mankind | Peace | People | Rank | Reason | Science | Sense | Time | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |

Basil Alfred Yeaxlee

Freedom springs from within, whether in a man or in a people. To remove disabilities and confer the franchise is not enough. Men must be enabled to grow if they are to exercise their rights with dignity and effect. For this reason the widening of the franchise in democratic countries has always been accompanied or followed by the development of popular education.

Character | Dignity | Education | Enough | Freedom | Man | Men | People | Reason | Rights | Wisdom |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Future | Present | Reason | Weapons | Will | Wisdom |

Catharine Trotter Cockburn

Even granting the author [Rutherford]... his main principle, ‘That every man’s own happiness is the ultimate end, which nature and reason teach him to pursue’, why may not nature and reason teach him, too, to have some desire to see others happy as well as himself, or give him some delight in doing what seems fit and right, if these things do not interfere with his own happiness?... Why may he not, with the pursuit of that end, join some other pursuits not inconsistent with it, instead of transforming every benevolent affection, every moral view, into self-interest? This surely neither does honour to religion, nor justice to human nature.

Character | Desire | Happy | Human nature | Justice | Man | Nature | Reason | Religion | Right | Self | Self-interest | Teach | Happiness |

Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky

The physical loss is not sufficient for mourning. Purely on a physical level what would a person gain if he lived many more years? What is the ultimate gain in devouring hundreds more chickens and thousands more loaves of bread? What is the overall difference if the deceased left all this to others? The Torah obligates us to mourn to emphasize the loss of the true value of life; which is the spiritual elevation a person could have gained if he were still alive. The Almighty placed him on this earth for this purpose. The person’s death should remind the mourners to fill their lives with the spiritual growth that they are capable of.

Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Life | Life | Mourn | Mourning | Purpose | Purpose | Loss | Torah | Value |

Paul Tyner

The absolute demonstration of man’s mastery of fate and command of all condition - the victory of man - all men in this racial man, this elder brother of mankind in his triumph over sin, fear and death! But one thing had remained in my mind as necessary to prove to the mass of men to-day man’s absolute supremacy over death in all its forms as an attribute of his oneness with God, with Eternal Life, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice, Omniscience and Omnipotence.

Absolute | Character | Day | Death | Eternal | Fate | Fear | God | Justice | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Mind | Omnipotence | Omniscience | Oneness | Sin | Fate |

Apocrypha NULL

How bitter is the thought of death to him who lives at peace!

Death | Peace | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Arthur Warwick

The reason that many men want their desires is because their desires want reason. He may do what he will that will do but what he may.

Character | Men | Reason | Will |

Owen D. Young

There is a single reason why 99 out of 100 average business men never become leaders. That is their unwillingness to pay the price of responsibility. By the price of responsibility I mean hard driving, continual work... the courage to make decisions, to stand the gaff... the scourging honesty of never fooling yourself about yourself... And the grooves that lead to the heights are not made between nine and five. They are burned in by the midnight oil.

Business | Character | Courage | Honesty | Men | Price | Reason | Responsibility | Work | Business |

Bella Abzug

Congress is a very unrepresentative institution. Not only from an economic class point of view, but from every point of view - sex, race, age, vocation... These men in Congress don’t represent a homogeneous point of view. They represent their own point of view - by reason of their sex, background and class.

Age | Men | Race | Reason | Wisdom |

Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL

Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair; a lamp unto my feet, that sun was given; and death was safety and great joy to find; but dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven.

Death | Heaven | Joy | Love | Wisdom |

Mitsuo "Mits" Aoki

I encounter death not so much as a problem to be solved, nor a puzzle to be pieced together, but as a mystery to be experienced. Death, whatever its meaning and real nature, seems always to elude us. It is, always and finally, a mystery. And mystery refuses to be captured and be used. We do not capture it, but are captured by it. And being captured, we can be 'engaged' to death and allow it to reveal its depth and richness.

Death | Meaning | Mystery | Nature | Wisdom |

W. W. Battershall

What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms.

Awe | Death | Earth | Eternal | God | History | Life | Life | Power | Silence | Sorrow | Wisdom | God |

Richard Baxter

Spend your time in nothing which you know must be repented of; in nothing on which you might not pray for the blessing of God; in nothing which you could not review with a quiet conscience on your dying bed; in nothing which you might not safely and properly be found doing if death should surprise you in the act.

Conscience | Death | God | Nothing | Quiet | Time | Wisdom |

Juliene Berk

Habits - the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.

Better | Good | Habit | Means | Reason | Wisdom |

Honoré de Balzac

Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert though which rings the voice of God.

God | Misfortune | Wisdom |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

We look at change but we do not see it. We speak of change, but we do not think about it. We say that change exists, that everything changes, that change is the very law of things: yes, we say it and we repeat it; but those are only words, and we reason and philosophize as though change did not exist.

Change | Law | Reason | Wisdom | Words | Think |