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

Felix Adler

If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts.

Excellence | Law | Man | Order | Qualities | Righteousness | Universe | Will | Excellence |

Felix Adler

The family is the school of duties... founded on love.

Achievement | Eternal | Life | Life | Power | Regard | Sorrow | Strength | Unity | Weakness | Understand |

Ezra Taft Benson

It must be remembered that the founding fathers of this great nation were men imbued with these principles [the Ten Commandments]. There are those in the land whose faith it is that these were “wise men whom [God] raised up” for the purpose of establishing the Constitution of the United States. They recognized that there are two possible sources to the origin of our freedoms that we have come to know as human rights. Rights are either God-given as part of a divine plan or they are granted as part of the political plan. Reason, necessity, and religious conviction and belief in the sovereignty of God led these men to accept the divine origin of these rights. To God’s glory and the credit of these men, our nation was uniquely born.

Man |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

Modern civilization has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo. We artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control.

Books | Man | Understand |

Feisal Abdul Rauf

I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.

Man |

Felix Adler

It is written that the last enemy to be vanquished is death. We should begin early in life to vanquish this enemy by obliterating every trace of the fear of death from our minds.

Law | Man | Need |

Felix Adler

The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth.

Criticism | Desire | Doubt | Faith | Improvement | Individual | Life | Life | Nations | Regard | Sacred | Intellect |

Ezra Taft Benson

Be cheerful in all that you do. Live joyfully. Live happily. Live enthusiastically, knowing that God does not dwell in gloom and melancholy, but in light and love.

Confidence | Life | Life | Light | World |

Ezra Taft Benson

If there is one word that describes the meaning of character, it is the word honor. Without honor, civilization would not long exist. Without honor, there could be no dependable contracts, no lasting marriages, no trust or happiness. What does the word honor mean to you? To me, honor is summarized in this expression by the poet Tennyson, "Man's word [of honor] is God in man."

Behavior | Control | Man | Victim |

Felix Adler

The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.

Contrast | Life | Life | Love | Mortal | Pain | Peace | Sense | Thought | Time | Understanding | Thought |

Felix Adler

Theories of what is true have their day. They come and go, leave their deposit in the common stock of knowledge, and are supplanted by other more convincing theories. The thinkers and investigators of the world are pledged to no special theory, but feel themselves free to search for the greater truth beyond the utmost limits of present knowledge. So likewise in the field of moral truth, it is our hope, that men in proportion as they grow more enlightened, will learn to hold their theories and their creeds more loosely, and will none the less, nay, rather all the more be devoted to the supreme end of practical righteousness to which all theories and creeds must be kept subservient. There are two purposes then which we have in view: To secure in the moral and religious life perfect intellectual liberty, and at the same time to secure concert in action. There shall be no shackles upon the mind, no fetters imposed in early youth which the growing man or woman may feel prevented from shaking off, no barrier set up which daring thought may not transcend. And on the other hand there shall be unity of effort, the unity that comes of an end supremely prized and loved, the unity of earnest, morally aspiring persons, engaged in the conflict with moral evil.

Aid | Cause | Culture | Evolution | Experience | Faith | Force | Humanity | Life | Life | Mankind | Morality | Nature | Optimism | Past | Peace | Pessimism | Power | Will |

Felix Adler

We should teach our children nothing which they shall ever need to unlearn; we should strive to transmit to them the best possessions, the truest thought, the noblest sentiments of the age in which we live.

Life | Life | Struggle |

Felix Adler

To-day, in the estimation of many, science and art are taking the place of religion. But science and art alike are inadequate to build up character and to furnish binding rules of conduct. We need also a clearer understanding of applied ethics, a better insight into the specific duties of life, a finer and a surer moral tact.

Children | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Meaning | Order | Rank | Sense | Words | Teacher | 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

The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also.

Events | Force | Life | Life | Meaning | Learn |

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 |

Felix Adler

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. And on the other hand we shall be just to those who have ceased to regard them as satisfactory and dispensed with them in their own persons.

Life | Life | Present | Race | Time |

Gustave Flaubert

Oh! You think that because I pass my life trying to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have not my little judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them.

Life | Life | Will | Wrong |

Gustave Flaubert

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

Man | Paradise |

Gustave Flaubert

Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.

Man |