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

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Art | Character | Culture | Money | Talking | Writing | Art |

Jeremy Collier

By reading a man does, as it we, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with past ages.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Past | Reading |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The temptation is not here, where you are reading about it or praying about it. It is down in your shop among bales and boxes, ten-penny nails, and sand-paper.

Character | Reading | Temptation | Temptation |

Henry Giles

The silent influence of books, is a mighty power in the world; and there is a joy in reading them known only to those who read them with desire and enthusiasm. Silent, passive, and noiseless though they be, they yet set in action countless multitudes and change the order of nations.

Action | Books | Change | Character | Desire | Enthusiasm | Influence | Joy | Nations | Order | Power | Reading | Wisdom | World |

James T. Farrell, fully James Thomas Farrell

When a man thinks he is reading the character of another, he is often unconsciously betraying his own.

Character | Man | Reading |

Benjamin Franklin

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead,, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

Character | Reading | Worth | Writing |

Joseph Anderson, fully Joseph Inslee Anderson

There is nothing that solidifies and strengthens a nation like reading of the nation’s own history, whether that history is recorded in books, or embodied in customs, institutions, and monuments.

Books | History | Nothing | Reading | Wisdom |

William L. Abbott

Develop the art of friendliness. One can experience a variety of emotions staying home and reading or watching television; one will be alive but hardly living. Most of the meaningful aspects of life are closely associated with people. Even the dictionary definition of life involves people.

Art | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | People | Reading | Television | Will | Wisdom | Art |

Bruno Bettelheim

Reading and what it can contribute to one's life is not something that pertains only to the ego and its conscious mind; it is also deeply rooted in the unconsciousness. Those who retain all through life a deep commitment to the literary harbor in their consciousness some residue of their earlier conviction that reading is an art permitting access to magic worlds, although very few of them are aware that they subconsciously believe this to be so.

Art | Commitment | Consciousness | Ego | Life | Life | Magic | Mind | Reading | Unconsciousness | Wisdom | Art |

Joe Bayly, fully Joseph Tate Bayly

In an age of the inconsequential and frivolous, reading fills our minds with the consequential. Reading involves stewardship of a mind, that was created in the divine image, to think great thoughts as well as to notice the small sparrow. Reading stretches the mind.

Age | Mind | Reading | Stewardship | Wisdom | Think |

William Ellery Channing

They who have read about everything are thought to understand everything, but it is not always so; reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections - we must chew them over again.

Enough | Knowledge | Mind | Reading | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought | Understand |

George Dawson

Half the gossip of society would perish if the books that are truly worth reading are read.

Books | Reading | Society | Wisdom | Worth | Society | Gossip |

Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell

When a man thinks he is reading the character of another, he is often unconsciously betraying his own; and this is especially the case with those persons whose knowledge of the world is of such sort that it results in extreme distrust of men.

Character | Distrust | Extreme | Knowledge | Man | Men | Reading | Wisdom | World |

Edna Ferber

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Death | Defeat | Life | Life | Love | Wisdom | Writing |

Jascha Heifetz

Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend.

Beginning | Children | Civilization | Education | Friend | Individual | Music | People | Play | Reading | Regard | Time | Will | Wisdom |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Books | Ecstasy | Good | People | Reading | Remorse | Sorrow | Will | Wisdom |

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Books | Insult | Reading | Wisdom | Insult |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Good | Judgment | Sound | Wisdom | Writing |