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 James

The sin of Science is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, the tendency to renovate its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors.

Experience | Mystical | Sense |

William James

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

Consciousness | Mind | Nothing | Psychology | Sense |

William James

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

Inquiry | Question | Sense | Will | Wrong |

William James

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.

Belief | Existence | Life | Life | Mind | Object | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Sense | Sentiment |

William James

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

Authority | Enough | Experience | Life | Life | Mystical | Rest | Sense | Will |

William James

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Morality | Sense |

William Morris

It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding, ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure, ye noted it not mid your hope and your pleasure; there was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding, but daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure.

Beauty | Desire | Humanity | Life | Life | Man | Men | Sense | Beauty |

William Morris

I have never been in any rich man's home that would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made of nine-tenths of all it held.

Beauty | Romance | Sense | Beauty |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

A man of understanding finds less difficulty in submitting to a wrong-headed fellow, than in attempting to set him right.

Love | Man | Sense |

Drew Curtis

Mass Media will respond that media issues are of great importance because they impact the public trust in news organizations. This ignores the fact that most people already believe Mass Media either makes stuff up, is biased one way or the other, or constantly gets information wrong. Finding out that journalists sometimes invent stories just confirms their preexisting viewpoint.

Innovation | Security | Sense | Survival | Thinking | Will | Loss |

Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

What did you say, Arthur? I said, how the hell did you get here? I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder. Hello, said Arthur. I expect that must be very interesting. Hi, said Thor, it is.

Fame | Sense | Think |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we despise all those who have not a single virtue.

Credit | Good | Sense |

William Shakespeare

O sovereign mistress of true melancholy, the poisonous damp of night disponge upon me, that life, a very rebel to my will, may hang no longer on me. Throw my heart against the flint and hardness of my fault, which, being dried with grief, will break to powder and finish all foul thoughts. O Antony, nobler than my revolt is infamous, forgive me in thine own particular, but let the world rank me in register a master-leaver and a fugitive.

Sense |

Dugald Stewart

The consequence has been (in too many physical systems), to level the study of nature, in point of moral interest, with the investigations of the algebraist.

Birth | Business | Imagination | Means | Power | Present | Sense | Business |