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

Edmund Husserl, fully Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl

Cognition is, after all, only human cognition, bound up with human intellectual forms, and unfit to reach the very nature of things, to reach things in themselves.

Nature | Wisdom |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Culture | Heaven | Hypocrisy | Wisdom |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all men, is now a rare gift.

Awe | Children | Greatness | Men | Sense | Soul | Teach | Wisdom | Wonder |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will conceal and cover up what is now shining with the greatest splendor.

Light | Time | Will | Wisdom |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Education | Learning | Wisdom |

Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all men, is now a rare gift.

Awe | Children | Greatness | Men | Sense | Soul | Teach | Wisdom | Wonder |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

Mingle a little folly with your wisdom; a little nonsense now and then is pleasant.

Folly | Little | Nonsense | Wisdom |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

No time exists other than now... So now is all you have and all you ever will have... Why not begin doing the best you can right where you are?... Trust the process of growth. Trust God. Pay attention to the details of your life, doing your very best with each challenge that presents itself... The past is the raw material of the present, but the past is not a blueprint for the present... Begin where you are. Do what you can. Even a small effort to change, to grow, to improve, will bring astonishing results... You can choose to build on what you were, but you are not what you were. You can focus on what you will be, but you are not what you will be. What you are is what you are right now - the inheritor of all of God’s gifts.

Attention | Challenge | Change | Effort | Focus | God | Growth | Life | Life | Past | Present | Right | Time | Trust | Will | Wisdom |

Osa Johnson, née Leighty

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put foundations under them.

Need | Wisdom | Work |

Thomas Jefferson

A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Government | Health | Little | Rebellion | Sound | Wisdom |

Thomas Jefferson

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in the punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Good | Government | Health | Little | Observation | People | Punishment | Rebellion | Rights | Sound | Truth | Wisdom | World |

Peter Matthiessen

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at un-extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each even of ordinary life.

Attention | Enlightenment | Life | Life | Meditation | Mindfulness | Nothing | Practice | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Douglas MacArthur

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method for settling international disputes.

Friend | Men | Method | Nothing | War | Wisdom |

James Russell Lowell

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

Ancestry | Man | Men | Past | Present | Wisdom |