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

Edwin Percy Whipple

The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

Action | Greatness |

Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

Like the visible means, the revealed mode is also tainted, destructive and excessive. Different from these and superior is that method consisting in discriminative knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest and the knower.

Action | Nature | People |

Edwin Percy Whipple

God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.

Action | Good | Thought | Thought |

Egyptian Proverbs

When a slave mounts a camel he wants to ride on both humps.

Learning |

Elif Safak

As soon as the words were out, sorry. Was preferable to the man considered extremely being a woman, as no other. It should not have to show any of it or another, it is imperfect, vulnerable person like everyone else. If you know that wearing a heart of glass, it will break.

Ability | Art | Practice | Reason | Art |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices. You cannot even simply become a mother anymore. You must choose motherhood. Will you choose change? Can you become its vanguard?

Action | Land | People |

Elihu Root

The old system of exploitation of colonies and the monopolization of their trade for the benefit of the mother country has practically disappeared.

Action | Argument | Conduct | Doctrine | Peace | Propaganda |

Albert Einstein

If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings.

Action | Consequences | Desire | Earnestness | Fulfillment | Individual | Life | Life | Mankind | Opinion | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Struggle |

Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

How old were you when you first realized that your parents were human? That they were not omnipotent, that what they said did not, in fact, go, they had dreams and feelings and scars? Or have you not realized that yet? Do you still call your parents and have a one-sided conversation with them, child to parent, not adult to adult?

Ability |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the Black middle class.

Action | Important |

William Shakespeare

Rudeness is a sauce to his good wit, which gives men stomach to digest his words, with better appetite.

Action | Cause | Grace | Little | World | Blessed |

William Shakespeare

Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes--I will be brief.

Action | Beauty | Rage | Time | Beauty |

Elizabeth Gilbert

He is only happy when he can maintain himself - mentally and spiritually - at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know where he is located every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power.

Learning | Words |

Elizabeth Gilbert

LIZ: What's it like in hell? KETUT: Same like heaven. Universe is a circle, Liss. To up, to down -- all same, at end. LIZ: Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell? KETUT: Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss. LIZ: You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell -- same destinations -- are the same thing anyway? KETUT: Same-same. Same in end, so better be happy on journey.

Learning |

Elizabeth Gilbert

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

Care | Credit | Justification | Learning | Need | Pleasure | Right |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.

Ability | Lord | Words |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I do not need to love you to prove that I love myself!!

Ability | Means | Men |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.

Discipline | Good | Learning | Peace | Solitude | Speech | Words | World |

Elizabeth Lesser

So please forgive me when I say that everything that happens to us in life is a blessing — whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy. It is true: There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments. At the end of a dark night of the soul is the beginning of a new life.

Action | Culture | Life | Life | Problems | Right | Time | Will |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A woman is always younger than a man at equal years.

Action | Means | Men | Rest | Woman |