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

Henry Edward Manning

Our character is our will; for what we will we are.

Character | Will |

Colin McGinn

Our concepts of the empirical world are fundamentally controlled by the character of our perceptual experience and by the introspective access we enjoy to our own minds. Thus our concepts of consciousness are constrained by the specific form of our own consciousness, so that we cannot form concepts for quite alien forms of consciousness possessed by other actual and possible creatures. Similarly, our concepts of the body, including the brain, are constrained by the way we perceive these physical objects; we have, in particular, to conceive of them as spatial entities essentially similar to other physical objects in space... But now these two forms of conceptual closure operate to prevent us from arriving at concepts for the property or relation that intelligibly links consciousness to the brain. For, first, we cannot grasp other forms of consciousness, and so we cannot grasp the theory that explains these other forms: that theory must be general, but we must always be parochial in our conception of consciousness. It is as if we were trying for a general theory of light but only could grasp the visible part of the spectrum. And, second, it is precisely the perceptually controlled conception of the brain that we have which is so hopeless in making consciousness an intelligible result of brain activity. No property we can ascribe to the brain on the basis of how it strikes us perceptually, however inferential the ascription, can be the crucible from which subjective consciousness emerges fully formed. That is why the feeling is so strong in us that there has to be something magical about the mind-brain relation.

Body | Character | Consciousness | Experience | Light | Mind | Property | Space | Wisdom | World |

Fynes Moryson

He invites a new injury who bears the old patiently.

Character | Old |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and province, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, to rule, to lay up treasure, to build, are at most but little appendices and props.

Books | Character | Conduct | Duty | Little | Order | Rule | Tranquility |

Cornelius Nepos

A man's own character shapes his fortune.

Character | Fortune | Man |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lend on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there by anything in our character worthy of imitation.

Beauty | Body | Character | Courtesy | Example | Grace | Imitation | Science | Time | Instruction | Beauty |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

Character | Lying |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

Not by age but by character is wisdom attained.

Age | Character | Wisdom |

Austin Phelps

In the destiny of every moral being there is an object more worthy of God than happiness. It is character. And the grand aim of man's creation is the development of grand character - and grand character is, by its very nature, the product of probationary discipline.

Character | Destiny | Discipline | God | Man | Nature | Object | God |

Publius Syrus

A man's own character is the arbiter of his fortune.

Character | Fortune | Man |

Thomas Paine

Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and angels know of us.

Angels | Character | God | Men | Reputation | God | Think |

Publius Syrus

Bad character never lacks an instructor.

Character |

Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton

The idea of soul, as a pure ego or mental substance, persists tenaciously in philosophy. I have argued that it cannot satisfactorily discharge the various tasks for which it has been recruited. The body, with marginal, speculative and dependent exceptions, is all that is required to individuate experiences and to supply then with an owner. An unobservable mental substance cannot individuate and provides a merely formal, because wholly inscrutable, solution to the problem of ownership. It is equally, and even more obviously, inept as an explanation of the identity of a person through time, which rests, not on the body, but on the complex of a person’s character and memories, related by continuity.

Body | Character | Ego | Philosophy | Soul | Time |

Publius Syrus

The best remedy for an injury is to forget it.

Character |

Helen Rowland

I have learned by experience that no man’s character can be eventually injured but by his own acts.

Character | Experience | Man |