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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One should only celebrate a happy ending; celebrations at the outset exhaust the joy and energy needed to urge us forward and sustain us in the long struggle. And of all celebrations a wedding is the worst; no day should be kept more quietly and humbly.

Day | Energy | Happy | Joy | Struggle | Wisdom |

Gail Hamilton, Pseud. of Mary A. Dodge

Men as yet need some help to their imagination. There remains still room for a little illusion. It is better for men, it is better for women, that each somewhat idealize the other. Much is lost when life has lost its atmosphere, and is reduced to naked fact.

Better | Illusion | Imagination | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Wisdom |

James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield

This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.

Art | Care | Energy | Men | Mind | Power | Wisdom | Worry | Art |

Ellen Goodman

There is no shower for a woman when she completes the trimester of her life spent as a full-time mother. There is no midwife to help that woman deliver a healthy adult.

Life | Life | Mother | Time | Wisdom | Woman |

Michael Harner

The shaman typically experiences ineffable joy in what he sees, an awe of the beautiful and mysterious worlds that open before him... He is a self-reliant explorer of the endless mansions of a magnificent hidden universe. Finally, he brings back his discoveries to build his knowledge and help others.

Awe | Joy | Knowledge | Self | Universe | Wisdom |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails, to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well.

Good | Power | Wisdom |

Paul G. Hoffman, fully Paul Gray Hoffman

It is a deep-seated belief on the part of almost all Americans that their success will be better assured as they help to build the success of others.

Belief | Better | Success | Will | Wisdom |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.

Good | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Soozi Holbeche

I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation.

Absolute | Acceptance | Age | Body | Choice | Coercion | Death | Enemy | Experience | Fear | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Right | Sense | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Time | Understanding | Unique | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

Bede Jarrett

Religion is not an opiate, for religion does not help people to forget, but to remember. It does not dull people. IT does not say, Take, but Give.

People | Religion | Wisdom |

William James

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help you create the fact.

Belief | Life | Life | Will | Wisdom | Worth |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Old disease patterns keep replicating themselves when the old thought patterns stay the same. All healing techniques serve to bring about a change in consciousness, which means a new expectancy of wholeness. What you expect at the deepest level is what you get. Your body loves to hear the truth about itself. Your body cannot help but respond to an awareness of and an expectancy of wholeness.

Awareness | Body | Change | Consciousness | Disease | Means | Thought | Truth | Wholeness | Wisdom | Awareness | Old | Thought |

Holger Kalweit

Life itself is experienced as an endless celebration, an eternal dance and rhythm, continuously pulsating sound. To the initiate, life is a vibrating, harmoniously synchronized melody. The shame works with this feeling of sharing the rhythm of the cosmic dance of fields of energy that are the source, the matrix of all matter.

Energy | Eternal | Life | Life | Melody | Shame | Sound | Wisdom |

Charles Kingsley

Make a rule, and pray to God to help you to keep it, never, if possible, to lie down at night without being able to say: "I have made one human being at least a little wiser, or a little happier, or at least a little better this day."

Beauty | Better | Glory | God | Little | Man | Music | Sacred | Wisdom | God |

Walter W. Van Kirk

I will do more than live and let live - I will live and help live.

Will | Wisdom |

John Locke

It is an established opinion among some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, stamped, as it were, upon the mind of man which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show how many men obtain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any such innate impressions... Let us suppose the mind to be a blank tablet; how comes it to be furnished? To this answer in one word, from experience.

Experience | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Opinion | Principles | Soul | Understanding | Wisdom | World |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

Wisdom |