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

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Further, laws and public transactions, together with everything that deserved the attention of mankind, were multiplied to such a degree, that the memory grew too weak for so heavy a burden; and human societies increased in such a manner, that the promulgation of the laws could not, without difficulty, reach the ears of every individual.

Ideas | Man | Memory |

Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well, replied the Master, where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.

Danger | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Time | Danger |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Rhime did not, in the fame manner as measure, figures, and metaphors, derive its origin from the first institution of languages.

Wants |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

I can do what I want, but the trouble is that I do not quite know what to do.

Enjoyment | Love | Man | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Not merely to learn philosophy, but to become a philosopher, this is what is now at stake. It does not involve giving up philosophy as a science; it rather involves aiming at possessing philosophy in a different and more exalted way as included in wisdom itself, to which it is in the same relation as a body to its soul. Then also does the philosophical life truly begin, and its beginning does not consist in any addition to already acquired learning; it rather looks like falling in love, like answering the call of a vocation, or undergoing the transforming experience of a conversion.

Life | Life | Man |

Eugen Herrigel

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Aims | Art | Awareness | Experience | Individual | Meaning | Means | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Present | Reflection | Spirit | Work | Art | Awareness |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.

Love | Man | Melancholy | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

The man is perishable. It can, but perish in resistant, and if nothing we are booked, not do not that this is a justice!

Enjoyment | Love | Man |

Eugene Peterson

It is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community.

Work | Companionship |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.

Better | Danger | Work | Danger |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

HOGAN: No, I wouldn't think it, but my motto in life is never trust anyone too far, not even myself.

Money | Wants | Understand |

Ethiopian Proverbs

To one who knows no better, a small garden is a forest.

Man |

Eudora Welty

Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss.

Challenge | Story | Work |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Every time our intellect thus succeeds in substituting some principles and causes of knowledge for knowledge itself, it is on the right road to wisdom. As a matter of fact, it has already found wisdom, at least in part, while awaiting the day when, fully aware of what the absolutely first principles and first causes truly are, it begins to see everything else in their light.

Man | Principles | Rest | Wise |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

A willingness enemy s' attaches me to hold in a state of suspension and obstacles to me fooled by the things vague and the expectations evasive.

Consequences | Man | Regard | Respect | Will | Respect |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

The man who loves the higher it gets, the more it is bound, it is more loved, more like it.

Man | Nothing |

Eugene Peterson

If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. There must be an organic unity between past and future lived in the present.

Experience | Feelings | Heart | Little | Need | Past | People | Will | Work | Value |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.

Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |

Eugene Peterson

Pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names still appear on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other Gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasnÂ’t the remotest connection with what the churchÂ’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

Life | Life | Work |