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

Rav Huna

A man is led the way he wishes to follow.

Character | Man | Wishes |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.

Beauty | Character | God | Light | Man | Men | Paradise | Peace | World |

William James

We are ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Cause | Character | Choice | Good | Man |

E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

Character | Man | Money | Principles |

E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

No man ever knows the few joys of living without some sort of success to his credit. Of all the games worth a candle, success is first. The greatest punishment is to be despised by your neighbors, the world and members of your family.

Character | Credit | Family | Man | Punishment | Success | World | Worth |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.

Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |

William James

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Character | Consciousness | Habit | Little | Man | People | Soul |

E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

I take them to be the only rich man that lives upon what he has, owes nothing, and is contented; for there is no determinate sum of money, nor quantity of estate, that can denote a man rich, since no man is truly rich that has not so much as perfectly satiates his desire of having more; for the desire of more is want, and want is poverty.

Character | Desire | Man | Money | Nothing | Poverty |

William James

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

Character | Man | Position | Responsibility | Will |

E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes.

Character | Man | Reform |

Max Horkheimer

The contradiction between what is requested of man and what can be offered to him has become so striking, the ideology so thin, the discontents in civilization so great that they must be compensated through annihilation of those who do not conform, political enemies, Jews, asocial persons, the insane. The new order of fascism is reason revealing itself as unreason.

Character | Civilization | Contradiction | Man | Order | Reason |

William Ralph Inge

To seek for the truth, for the sake of knowing the truth, is one of the noblest objects a man can live for.

Character | Knowing | Man | Truth |

Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, also known as Ben Ezra or Abenezra

There is none more lonely than the man who loves only himself.

Character | Man | Wisdom |

Washington Irving

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

Character | Ideas | Language | Little | Man | Sound | Thought | Will | Words | Thought |