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

Euripedes NULL

His worth shines forth the brightest who in hope always confides; the abject soul despairs.

Hope | Soul | Wisdom | Worth |

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 |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Experience | Insight | Life | Life | Wisdom | Worth |

David Hume

Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

Care | Children | Discernment | Little | Nature | Nothing | Universe | Wisdom | Worth |

Jack Holland

Character must stand behind and back up everything - the sermon, the poem, the picture, the play. None of them is worth a straw without it.

Character | Play | Wisdom | Worth |

Rufus Cecil Holman

Genius is intensity. The man who gets anything worth having is the man who goes after his object as a bulldog goes after a cat - with every fiber in him tense with eagerness and determination.

Determination | Genius | Man | Object | Wisdom | Worth |

William James

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help you create the fact.

Belief | Life | Life | Will | Wisdom | Worth |

Rudyard Kipling

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;... If you can fill the unforgiving minute With Sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Dreams | Earth | Man | Wisdom | Worth | Think |

Charles Lamb

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking.

Heaven | Indifference | Mind | Music | Past | Sadness | Sound | Time | Wisdom | Worth | Old |

John Locke

It is labor... which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything.

Labor | Land | Wisdom | Worth | Value |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

There is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

Knowing | Longing | Wisdom | Worth |

Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Bourgeoisie | Freedom | History | Wisdom | Worth |

Joseph Fort Newton

We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we take it, what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end. How to take the raw stuff of life and make it a thing of worth and beauty - that is the test of living.

Beauty | Life | Life | Wisdom | Worth | Beauty |

Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

I never listen to calumnies, because, if they are untrue, I run the risk of being deceived, and if they are true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.

Risk | Thinking | Wisdom | Worth |

Margaret E. Mulac

Solitude is important to man. It is necessary to his achievement of peace and contentment. It is a well into which he dips for refreshment for his soul. It is his laboratory in which he distills the pure essence of worth from the raw materials of his experiences. It is his refuge when the very foundations of his life are being shaken by disastrous events.

Achievement | Contentment | Events | Important | Life | Life | Man | Peace | Solitude | Soul | Wisdom | Worth |