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

Nikos Kazantzakis

Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction.

Habit | Sin |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

In the universal sense, love is the divine power of attraction in creation that harmonizes, unites, binds together... Those who live in tune with the attractive force of love achieve harmony with nature and their fellow beings, and are attracted to blissful reunion with God.

Force | God | Harmony | Love | Nature | Power | Sense |

Norman Vincent Peale

The habit of dropping choice thoughts into consciousness and allowing them to permeate the mental structure results finally in a thought pattern that affects virtually the totality of one's life.

Choice | Consciousness | Habit | Life | Life | Thought | Thought |

Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL

By habit love enters the mind; by habit is love unlearnt.

Habit | Love | Mind |

Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

As small letters hurt the sight, so do small matters him that is too much intent upon them: they vex and stir up anger, which begets an evil habit in him in reference to greater affairs.

Anger | Evil | Habit |

Pierre Bayle

Our Reason is capable of nothing but the creation of a universal confusion and universal doubt.

Doubt | Nothing | Reason |

Plato NULL

Virtue is a kind of health, beauty and habit of the soul.

Beauty | Habit | Health | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |

Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL

Choose the life that is best, and constant habit will make it pleasant. [Choose always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be; custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.]

Custom | Habit | Life | Life | Will |

Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt

I still lived in the future--a habit which is the death of happiness.

Death | Future | Habit |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.

Habit |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the property of the religious spirit to be the most refining of all influences. No external advantages, no culture of the tastes, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, or even depth of affection, can bestow that delicacy and that grandeur of bearing which belong only to the mind accustomed to celestial conversation, all else is but gilt and cosmetics, beside this, as expressed in every look and gesture.

Association | Conversation | Culture | Habit | Mind | Property | Spirit | Association |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Robert Fritz

The way you activate the seeds of your creation is by making choices about the results you want to create. When you make a choice, you mobilize vast human energies and resources which otherwise go untapped. All too often people fail to focus their choices upon results and therefore their choices are ineffective. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible and reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.

Choice | Focus | People |

Sam Keen

Perhaps the greatest price men have paid for the obsession with fearlessness is to have become tough on the outside but empty within. We are hollow men. The connection between fearlessness and feelinglessness should be obvious.

Men | Obsession | Price |

Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds fulfillment of something implanted in its nature.

Art | Fulfillment | God | Nature | Sense | Soul |

Oliver Lodge, fully Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge

We are rising to the conviction that we are a part of nature, and so a part of God; that the whole creation – the One and the many and the All-One – is travailing together toward some great end; and that now, after ages of development, we have at length become conscious portions of the great scheme, and can cooperate in it with knowledge and joy.

God | Joy | Knowledge | Nature |

Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney

As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men’s minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious.

Battle | Habit | Labor | Men | Strength | Suffering | Work |