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

William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

Law | Nature | Order | Play | Sense | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

Society is a wall of very strong masonry, as it now stands; it may be sapped in the course of a thousand years, but stormed in a day - no! You dash your head against it - you scatter your brains, and you dislodge a stone. Society smiles in scorn, effaces the stain, and replaces the stone.

Day | Society | Wisdom | Society |

Richard Cecil

The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of the grace in the church and in the soul.

Church | Earth | Fury | Grace | Life | Life | Nature | Soul | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Man | Order | Wealth | Wisdom | Worship |

James Burgh

Before you think of retiring from the world, be sure you are fit for retirement; in order to which it is necessary that you have a mind so composed by prudence, reason, and religion, that it may bear being looked into; a turn to rural life, and a love of study.

Life | Life | Love | Mind | Order | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Religion | Retirement | Study | Wisdom | World | Think |

Vernon Carter

The teaching of any science, for purposes of liberal education, without linking it with social progress and teaching its social significance, is a crime against the student mind. It is like teaching a child how to pronounce words but now what they mean.

Crime | Education | Mind | Progress | Science | Wisdom | Words | Child |

Horace Bushnell

It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We lie here in our nest, unfledged and weak, guessing dimly at our future, and scarce believing what even now appears. But the power is in us, and that power is finally to be revealed. And what a revelation will that be!

Future | Power | Revelation | Will | Wisdom |

Nicholas Murray Butler

Time was invented by Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

Chance | God | Ideas | Order | Time | Wisdom | God |

Mark Caine

The success always has a number of projects planned, to which he looks forward. Any one of them could change the course of his life overnight.

Change | Life | Life | Looks | Success | Wisdom |

James Burke

The key to why things change is the key to everything.

Change | Wisdom |

Samuel Butler

Our latest moment is always our supreme moment. Five minutes delay in dinner now is more important that a great sorrow ten years gone.

Delay | Important | Sorrow | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Ignorance | Order | Pleasure | Smile | Wisdom |

Richard Cecil

I could write down twenty cases, wherein I wished God had done otherwise than he did; but which I now see, had I had my own will, would have led to extensive mischief. The life of a Christian is a life of paradoxes.

God | Life | Life | Will | Wisdom | God |

Agatha Christie, fully Dame Agatha Miller Christie

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Nothing | War | Wisdom |

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, also known as Mulock, Mrs Craik, Mrs Craik, Miss Mulok, Miss Muloch, Miss Mulock

"Order is Heaven's first law," and a mind without order can by no possibility be either a healthy or a happy mind.

Happy | Heaven | Law | Mind | Order | Wisdom |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

If I had my life to live again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Wisdom | Loss |