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

Emma Goldman

The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.

Aims | Distinguish | History | Influence | Lesson | Man | Means | Philosophy | Power | Revolution | Tragedy |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

The whole acuity of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life and being. In this sense suffering is the impossibility of nothingness.

Power | Relationship | Solitude |

Emmet Fox

Success and happiness are the natural condition of mankind. It is actually easier for us to demonstrate these things than the reverse. Bad habits of thinking and acting may obscure this fact for a time, just as a wrong way of walking or sitting, or holding a pen or a musical instrument may seem to be easier than the proper way, because we have accustomed ourselves to it; but the proper way is the easier nevertheless.

Life | Life | Man | Power | Sense | Truth | Will | Woman | Friends |

Emmet Fox

This Indwelling Power, the Inner Light, or Spiritual Idea, is spoken of in the Bible as a child, and throughout the Scriptures the child symbolically always stands for this. Bible symbolism has its own beautiful logic, and just as the soul is always spoken of as a woman, so this, the Spiritual Idea that is born to the soul, is described as a child.

Existence | Need | People | Power | Right | Work | World | Privilege |

Emmet Fox

When you are praying for your true place, it is well to remember that the full demonstration may not come in one move, but more likely after a series of stages. Now, if you despise these intermediate steps, and think “this is a little better, but it is not really what I want,” you will keep the demonstration back. Neither should you accept a small improvement as being all that you can hope to get. The scientific attitude is to see the stepping stone as a stepping stone; to bless it, and give thanks for it, and to continue praying for the next step.

God | Power | Space | Time | Will | Work | God |

Eric Allen Johnston

Most government officials are rushing headlong to solve the problems of 50 years ago, with their ears assailed by the sound of snails whizzing by.

Business | Power | Business |

Ervin László

We rarely write the names of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon – each unique and surely of crucial significance – as here, honoring them with a capital letter. This may seem trivial, but our dislocation from nature is one of the most serious schisms in our dismembered psyche and probably the most urgent relationship we need to heal.

Action | Consciousness | Energy | Important | Intention | Law | Power |

Evgeny Morozov

It's political and economic factors, rather than the ease of forming associations, that primarily set the tone and vector in which social networks contribute to democratization; one would be naive to believe that such factors would always favor democracy.

Belief | Force | Neglect | Popularity | Power | Space | Technology | Will | World |

Erin McKean

And I don't like people who eat powdered doughnuts. I don't car how careful you are, they're just plain messy. I can't believe they taste good enough to justify getting that sugar all over everything, especially me.

Power |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, "No, thank you" to dessert that night. And for what?!

Control | Family | Power | Television |

Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes

The master key to life is Unity. All the ills of life are due to inharmony, inharmony is due to a sense of separation and lack of unity. But when we have once more made our unity with All-Good we become bondservants no more to the Law, but rather the Law becomes our servant while we pass into the glorious freedom of the sons of God.

Mind | Power | World |

Eric S. Raymond

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Capacity | Individual | Machines | Power | Talking |

Fahad Al-Attiya

This is the situation in Qatar: … We only have two days of water reserve, we import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land.

Power |

Ernest Becker

Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

Power |

Ernest Becker

We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.

Belief | Children | Meaning | Power | Reason | Wonder | World |

Ernest Becker

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.

Absence | Consciousness | Death | Evil | Means | Meditation | Men | Power |

Ernest Becker

And so, the question for the science of mental health must be­come an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that re­flects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.

Absolute | Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Confidence | Order | Parents | Power | Question | Security | Self | Society | Terror | Understanding | Weakness | Worth | Society | Child | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance.

Day | Man | Position | Power | Time | War | Will | Crisis |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

When it was all of us realist impossible dream, but in my heart do not throw.

Oppression | Peace | Power |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may fell, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world – from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced – are the rich societies and not the poor.

Power | Sympathy |