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

Ezra Taft Benson

It is my conviction that the Constitution of the United States was established by the hands of wise men whom the Lord raised up unto this very purpose. The Lord expects us to safeguard this sacred and inspired document for the blessing of all of us and our posterity. If we fail so to do we will not only lose our priceless freedom but jeopardize the cause of truth throughout the entire world.

Belief | Choice | Destiny | Duty | Family | Father | Heaven | Land | Men | Mission | People | Wise |

Felix Adler

There is a great and crying evil in modern society. It is want of purpose. It is that narrowness of vision which shuts out the wider vistas of the soul. It is the absence of those sublime emotions which, wherever they arise, do not fall to exalt and consecrate existence.

Difficulty | Heart | Influence | Meaning | Men | Right | Understand |

Felix Adler

There is a city to be built, the plan of which we carry in our heads, in our hearts. Countless generations have already toiled at the building of it. The effort to aid in completing it, with us, takes the place of prayer. In this sense we say, "Laborare est orare."

Daring | Life | Life | Man | Men | Present | Righteousness | Search | Theories | Thinkers | Thought | Time | Truth | Unity | Will | Woman | World | Youth | Youth | Learn | Thought |

Felix Adler

There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded and restated. In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust, "though the heavens should fall." A merely borrowed belief is, at such time, like a rotten plank across a raging torrent. The moment we step upon it, it gives way beneath our feet.

Life | Life | Man | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Universe |

Gustave Flaubert

Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

Men | Learn |

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Hate |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

If Wall Street really wants to dispose of John L. Lewis, let it invite him to a swell feed, hand him a fifty-cent cigar with a torpedo in it, and so burn off his eyebrows.

Hate | Time | Will |

Gustave Flaubert

There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one?s vanity?the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

Day | Fate | God | Hate | Life | Life | Nothing | Fate | God |

Gustave Flaubert

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Men |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour?all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.

Men |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Hate | Little | Think |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

Hate |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Men | Wise |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

Men |

Hans Reichenbach

The famous assertion by Einstein that the length of a rod depends on its velocity and on the chosen definition of simultaneity. ...is based on the fact that we do not measure the length of the rod, but its projection on a system at rest. How the length of the projection depends on the choice of simultaneity can be illustrated by reference to a photograph taken through a focal-plane shutter. Such a shutter... consists of a wide band with a horizontal slit, which slides down vertically. Different bands are photographed successively on the film. Moving objects are therefore strangely distorted; the wheels of a rapidly moving car for instance, appear to be slanted. The shape of the objects in the picture will evidently depend on the speed of the shutter. Similarly, the length of the moving segment depends on the definition of simultaneity. One definition of simultaneity differs from another because events that are simultaneous for one definition occur successively for another. What may be a simultaneity projection of a moving segment for one definition is a "focal-plane shutter photograph" for another.

Men |

Italian Proverbs

Of this world each man has as much as he takes.

Life | Life | Men |

Italian Proverbs

No one is bound to do impossibilities.

Care | Hate | Health |

Italian Proverbs

No sooner is the law made than its evasion is discovered.

Evil | Men |

Italian Proverbs

One is never too old to yearn.

Hate | Love | Philosophy | Reform | Will |

Italian Proverbs

The first blow is as good as two.

Courage | Mankind | Men | Peace | Strength | Tears | Will |