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

Tryon Edwards

Nature and revelation are alike God's books; each may have mysteries, but in each there are plain practical lessons for everyday duty.

Enjoyment | Men | Morality | Prudence | Prudence | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Society | Old | Vice |

Tryon Edwards

Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.

Morality | Piety | Religion | Spirit |

Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun

Always be honest and open in your speech and actions. Don't be sneaky or evasive with anyone. A straight mind is the Bodhimanda.

Morality | People | Religion | Virtue | Virtue | Words | World |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.

Day |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

The term nature is used sometimes in a wider, sometimes in a narrower extension. When employed in its most extensive meaning, it embraces the two worlds of mind and matter. When employed in its most restricted signification, it is a synonyme for the latter only, and is then used in contradistinction to the former.

Man | Morality | Personality | Responsibility |

William Godwin

Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error.

Existence | Influence | Man | Men | Morality | Passion | Past | System | Teach | Thinking | Trust | Understanding | Will |

William James

For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Life | Life | Morality | Patriotism | Service |

William James

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

Morality | Sense |

Albert Einstein

Nevertheless we all feel that it is indeed very reasonable and important to ask ourselves how we should try to conduct our lives. The answer is, in my opinion: satisfaction of the desires and needs of all, as far as this can be achieved, and achievement of harmony and beauty in the human relationships. This presupposes a good deal of conscious thought and of self-education. It is undeniable that the enlightened Greeks and the old Oriental sages had achieved a higher level in this all-important field than what is alive in our schools and universities.

Admiration | Little | Morality | Spirit |

Elif Safak

Sometimes ... yaralanıveririz so suddenly. But every wound will heal itself. Eventually heals, top off. Stored in the eyes. Does not want to be seen because there is no wound. As long as they advocate the wound pupils. Because if pupils are injured, you cannot look the world in the same way ever again. You start to see the bad side of everything you look at. Contaminants that have remained hidden even run away from his eyes. Did not see things that other people feel the same anymore and you do not love them anymore. Uncomfortable. They cannot look you in the same way again. This is close to you, so no one wants to see. Picture the same image, in fact, changing your eyes. If you walk out the picture, everything remains as before, not everyone is comfortable. Personally, I think it is best to go in such situations. Top go to the top. Out of spite.

Consciousness | Duty | God | Individual | Morality | Rule | God | Learn |

Albert Einstein

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

Awe | Important | Morality | People | Will |

Elizabeth Gilbert

But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.

Business | Ceremony | Church | Marriage | Morality | Rest | Vows | Will | Business |

Elizabeth Lesser

It does pay to be honest. It pays in rewarding relationships. It pays in unblocked energy. It pays in passion. To stand tall in who you are, unafraid to reveal what you want and need, kind enough to tell the truth, and brave enough to bear the consequences, is a telling sign of spiritual development.

Compassion | Generosity | Life | Life | Meaning | Morality | Openness | Religion | Thought | Thought |

Emma Goldman

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.

Body | Earth | Fear | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Morality | Pain | Religion | Self-denial | Sorrow | Soul | Struggle |

Emma Goldman

Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass.

Belief | Daring | Fear | Fidelity | Honesty | Life | Life | Morality |

Emma Goldman

The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

Glory | Morality | Pain | Religion | Self-denial | Sorrow |

Eugene Peterson

Have no fear about doing so, for we have a “warts-and-all” religion.

Cause | Children | Family | God | Grace | Mind | God | Learn |

Eugenio Montale

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

Beginning | Desire | Life | Life | Meaning | Myth | Question |

Evan Esar

If at first you do not recede, diet and diet again.

Man | Morality | Reason |