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

Henry Fielding

Great joy, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.

Change | Circumstances | Heart | Joy | Wisdom |

Jerry Falwell

No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”

Eternal | Eternity | Existence | Fulfillment | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Longing | Man | Meaning | Order | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Relationship | Right | Search | Time | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Woman | God |

Albert Flanders, Albert I, born Albert Leopold Clément Marie Meinrad

Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity.

Change | Duty | Opportunity | Wisdom |

Edward Everett

Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.

Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |

Environment Pollution Panel NULL

The pervasive nature of pollution, its disregard of political boundaries including state lines, the national character of the technical, economic and political problems involved, and the recognized Federal responsibilities for administering vast public lands which can be changed by pollution, for carrying out large enterprises which can produce pollutants, for preserving and improving the nation’s natural resources, all make it mandatory that the Federal Government assume leadership and exert its influence in pollution abatement on a national scale.

Character | Government | Influence | Nature | Problems | Public | Wisdom | Government | Leadership |

Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

Universal peace will be realized, not because man will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace.

Better | Man | Order | Peace | Science | Will | Wisdom |

François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition.

Order | Providence | Will | Wisdom |

Norman Geschwind

One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"

Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |

Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn

By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.

Existence | Human race | Order | Peace | Race | Wisdom |

Mildred & Victor Goertzel

Three out of five of the Four Hundred [eminent individuals of the twentieth century] had serious school problems. In order of importance, their dissatisfactions were: with the curriculum; with dull irrational or cruel teachers; with others students who bullied, ignored, or bored them; and with school failure.

Failure | Order | Problems | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.

Change | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He only is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor command in order to be something.

Happy | Order | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Day | God | Life | Life | Little | Man | Music | Order | Poetry | Sense | Soul | Wisdom | God |

Kurt Gödel, also Goedel

I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future.

Confidence | Future | Intuition | Meaning | Perception | Question | Reason | Sense | Theories | Will | Wisdom |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.

Children | Experience | Experiment | Order | Taste | Wisdom |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it: psychosis denies it and tries to substitute something else for it. A reaction which combines features of both these is the one we call normal or "healthy"; it denies reality as little as neurosis, but then, like psychosis, is concerned with effecting a change in it.

Change | Existence | Little | Reality | Wisdom |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in order to produce that ‘good behavior’ which is so highly prized, they cannot do better than deceive children in sexual matters and intimidate them by religious means. The stronger characters will, it is true, withstand these influences; they will become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other form of authority. When children do not receive the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves in secret with the problem, and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mixed up in the most extraordinary way with grotesque inventions; or else they whisper confidences to each other which, because of the sense of guilt in the youthful inquirers, stamp everything sexual as horrible and disgusting.

Authority | Behavior | Better | Children | Good | Guilt | Means | Order | Parents | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Receive | Sense | Thought | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Thought |

Madame Émile de Girardin, Delphine de Girardin, née Gay

The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.

Change | Defeat | Power | Wisdom | Words |

Benjamin Franklin

One day is worth two tomorrows; never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today. What I am to be, I am now becoming.

Day | Tomorrow | Wisdom | Worth |