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

Thomas Hardy

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

History | Indifference |

Thomas Merton

In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate.

Indifference | Life | Life | Love |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Funeral Blues - Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeropanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good

Dread | Earth | Indifference | Little | Man | Passion | Learn | Think |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.

Indifference | Life | Life | Looks | Man | People | Will | Witness | Woman | Loss | Old |

Walter Lippmann

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.

Authority | Freedom | Indifference | Life | Life | Man | Men | Order | Rights | Spirit | Thought | World | Thought |

Walter Savage Landor

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

God | Indifference | Pardon | Will | Writing | God |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.

Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |

Wallace Stevens

That scrawny cry—it was a chorister whose C preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, surrounded by its choral rings, still far away. It was like a new knowledge of reality.

Desire | Indifference | Mind | Thinking | Poem | Think |

Vimala Thakar

There is much unexplored potential in each human being. We are not just flesh and bone or an amalgamation of conditionings. If this were so, our future on this planet would not be very bright. But there is infinitely more to life, and each passionate being who dares to explore beyond the fragmentary and superficial into the mystery of totality helps all humanity perceive what it is to be fully human. Revolution, total revolution, implies experimenting with the impossible. And when an individual takes a step in the direction of the new, the impossible, the whole human race travels through that individual.

Acceptance | Action | Consciousness | Cynicism | History | Indifference | Integration | Majority | People | Service | Society | Spirituality | Work | Society |

Vimala Thakar

Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Humanity | Indifference | Afraid |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay' – no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.

Indifference | Love | Nothing |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

Body | Indifference | Opinion |

Václav Havel

If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.

Day | Difficulty | Indifference | Man | Self | Sense | Silence | Sympathy |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

Power is, therefore, a word which we may use both in an active and in a passive signification; and in psychology we may apply it both to the active faculty and to the passive capacity of the mind.

Absolute | Ends | Indifference | Knowledge | Reason | Science | Truths |

Elihu Root

When a teacher of the future comes to point out to the youth of America how the highest rewards of intellect and devotion can be gained, he may say to them, not by subtlety and intrigue not by wire pulling and demagoguery not by the arts of popularity not by skill and shiftiness in following expediency but by being firm in devotion to the principles of manhood and the application of morals and the courage of righteousness in the public life of our country by being a man without guile and without fear, without selfishness, and with devotion to duty, devotion to his country.

Better | Character | Evil | Folly | Government | Ignorance | Indifference | Indolence | Knowledge | Law | Life | Life | Little | Mind | Nature | Responsibility | Suffering | Time | World | Wrong | Government |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

To-day the houses seemed taller and farther apart; the street wider and full of bright, clear light that cast no shadows and was never sunshine. Under archways and between the houses the distances had a curious transparency, as though they had been painted upon glass. Against the luminous and indeterminate sky the Abbey tower rose distinct and delicate.

Indifference | Life | Life | Time | Unconsciousness | Friendship |

Emil M. Cioran

Each time I think of the essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.

Indifference | Regret | Universe | Will |

Eudora Welty

My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In Once upon a time, an o had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.

Indifference | Passion |

Eugenio Montale

I fell, giving the arm at least a million stairs | and now you're not there is a vacuum at each step .

Indifference | Lord |