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

Ben Sira

In much eating lurketh sickness.

Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

In all affairs, love, religion, politics or business, it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.

Business | Love | Politics | Question | Religion |

Chinese Proverbs

When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.

Man |

Edmund Burke

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Francis Bacon

A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison.

Body | Prison | Soul |

Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first freedom is speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world-terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world-terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

Aggression | Fear | Freedom from fear | Freedom | Future | God | Life | Life | Means | Position | Speech | Time | Vision | Will | World | Worship | God |

George Santayana

That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but is use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to dance is not rendered ironical because the danced cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so. what is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.

Cause | Death | Enough | Illusion | Impulse | Life | Life | Nature | Object | People | Pleasure | Sound | Time | Virtue | Virtue |

Jerry Rubin

Medical doctors strike me as ignorant as to how a healthy body works. They know how to control or repair some diseased bodies, but their medicine is often worse than the disease. And what about the pressure and competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry and the make-profits-quick motives of the food corporations? Medical doctors put little or no emphasis on nutrition, exercise and energy balance. They are paid when we are sick, not when we are well.

Balance | Body | Control | Disease | Energy | Industry | Little | Motives |

Lin Yutang

There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a healthy wise old man.

Man | Nothing | Wise | World | Old |

Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

Health | Memory | Nothing | Study | Will |

Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by innoculating them with the virus that is a thousad times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

People |

Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Death is a great preacher of deathlessness. The protest of the soul against death, its reversion, its revulsion, is a high instinct of life. Dissatisfaction in his world who satisfieth the desire of every living thing has a grip on the future. As far as this goes, he has the least assurance of immortality who can be best satisfied with eating and drinking and “things”’ he has the surest hope of ongoings and far distances who does not live by brad alone, whose eye is looking over the shoulder of things, whose ear hears mighty waters rolling ever more, who has “hopes naught can satisfy below.” The limits of which death makes us aware, make us aware of life’s limitlessness. The wing cage knows it was meant for an ampler ether and diviner air.

Death | Desire | Future | Hope | Immortality | Instinct | Life | Life | Protest | Soul | World |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

Personal health is preserved by learning about one’s own constitution, by finding out what is good or bad for oneself, by continual self-control in eating habits and comforts (but just to the extent needed for self-preservation), by forgoing sensual pleasures, and lastly, by the professional skill of those to whose science these matters belong.

Control | Good | Health | Learning | Science | Self | Self-control | Self-preservation | Skill |

Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL

The dietary laws train us to master our appetites and not to consider... eating and drinking the end of man's existence.

Existence | Man |

Michael Toms and Justine Willis Toms

Basically, human beings want satisfaction and fulfillment, and we especially want to feel a sense of accomplishment in what we are doing. Being of service and achieving something of value to others while feeling balanced and healthy are the essential reasons for working.

Accomplishment | Fulfillment | Sense | Service | Value |

Nathaniel Branden

For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.

Control | Desire | Man | Pleasure | Reality |

Norman Vincent Peale

Have a good healthy faith in yourself - you are greater than you think.

Faith | Good |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

Watch your motives in everything. Both the greedy man and the yogi eat. But would you say that eating is a sin because it is often associated with greed? Sin lies in the thought, in the motive. The worldly man eats to satisfy his greed, and the yogi eats to keep his body well. There is a lot of difference.

Body | Greed | Man | Motives | Sin | Thought |