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

William Shakespeare

Sir, my circumstances, Being so near the truth as I will make them, Must first induce you to believe; whose strength I will confirm with oath, which I doubt not You'll give me leave to spare when you shall find You need it not. Cymbeline (Iachimo at II, iv)

Fighting | Heart |

Elizabeth Lesser

Are you becoming more and more aware of the interconnection of all beings, creatures and elements? Do you hold as your own Jesus' words: 'And whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me'? Are you getting tired of the way our society celebrates the false ego's selfish and insatiable drive to acquire and use more and more? And does that make you want to be an agent of healing? A declaration of life's interdependence is a sign of spiritual progress.

Arrogance | Fear | Fighting | Health | Life | Life | Listening | Nature | Practice | Soul | Surrender | Uncertainty | Will |

Dorothy Parker

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.

Better | Fighting | Hell | Men | Thought | Woman | Old | Thought |

Emma Goldman

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism? Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities. Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.

Atheism | Belief | Earth | Fighting | God | Individual | Influence | Man | Power | Rule | Servitude | Thought | God | Thought |

Emma Goldman

It takes less mental effort to condemn than to think.

Atheism | Fighting | Influence | Thought | Thought |

Emmet Fox

Never resent jealousy, it is the heights of flattery - no one is ever jealous of a fool.

Chance | Courtesy | Enemy | Error | Evil | Fighting | Harmony | Heart | Knowing | Men | Nothing | Power | Rest | Sense | Thought | Time | Truth | Old | Think | Thought |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

Fighting |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I heard them laugh. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep. It was not necessary to read any more. I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But i could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't! I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.

Challenge | Day | Fighting | Men | Think |

Ernest Becker

Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nine­teenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primi­tive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reli­gions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Control | Death | Fighting | Good | Health | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Play | Question | Reality | Right | Science | Security | Self-deception | Time | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Fighting | Hate | Will | World | Worth |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.

Fighting | Hate | World | Worth |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

I feel on my face all the pain slap went Elymazlom in the this world, wherever he found injustice, the same is the national.

Fighting | Revolution | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

I do not agree with what you say, but I'll stand to the death defending your right to say what you want.

Fighting | Individual | Method | Objectives | Will |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

LAVINIA: He made me feel for the first time in my life that everything about love could be sweet and natural... I have a right to love!

Contempt | Fighting | Heart | Little | Pride | Afraid | Old | Think |

Eugenio Montale

The man of the future will be born equipped with a brain and a nervous system quite different from those we have we, human yet traditional, Copernican, classics.

Fighting | Man | Unhappiness |

Ezra Taft Benson

Do not be caught up in materialism, one of the real plagues of our generation-that is, acquiring things, fast-paced living, and securing career success.

Fighting | Knowing | Meditation | Optimism | Recreation | Right |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Dreams | Fighting | Love | Paradise | Forgive |

Gustave Flaubert

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Fighting | Fun | Learning | Wife |

Gustavo Gutiérrez

A neighbor is not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.

Fighting | Good |