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

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

Envy is a week that grows in all soils and climates, and is no less luxuriant in the country than in the court; is not confined to any rank of men or extent of fortune, but rages in the breasts of all degrees.

Character | Envy | Fortune | Men | Rank |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Not in the achievement, but in the endurance of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite God.

Achievement | Character | Endurance | God | Soul |

James Fenimore Cooper

Hope is the most treacherous of all human fancies.

Character | Hope | Wisdom |

James Fenimore Cooper

A true history of human events would show a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Accident | Character | Events | History | Reason |

Thomas Chalmers

Thousands of men breathe, move, and live, pass off the stage of life, and are heard of no more. Why? they do not partake of good in the world, and none were blessed by them; none could point to them as the means of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spake, could be recalled; and so they perished: their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storm of time can never destroy. Write your name, in kindness, love, and mercy, on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year: you will never be forgotten. No! your name, your deeds, will be as legible on the hearts you leave behind you as the stars on the brow of evening. Good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven.

Character | Darkness | Deeds | Good | Life | Life | Light | Man | Means | Men | Redemption | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Deeds | Blessed |

William Ellery Channing

The sense of duty is the fountain of human rights. In other words, the same inward principle which teaches the former bears witness to the latter Duties and rights must stand and fall together.

Character | Duty | Rights | Sense | Witness | Words |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.

Ability | Character | Courage | Distrust | Meekness | Revenge | Self | Soul | Forgive |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Some men never feel small; but these are the men who are.

Character | Men |

William Camden

Young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be so.

Character | Men | Old | Think |

Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL

You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.

Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |

William Ellery Channing

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

Character | Spirit |

V. W. Burrows

One of the saddest experiences which can ever come to a human being is to awaken, gray-haired and wrinkled near the close of an unproductive career, to the fact that all through the years he has been using only a small part of himself!

Character | Wisdom |

Margaret M. Butts

Learn to laugh. And most of all, learn to laugh at yourself. The person who can give a riotous account of his own faux pas, will never have to listen to another's embarrassing account of it. He will rarely know the sting of humiliation. His a delight to be with, but more important, he is enjoying his own life, and applying to his ills and errors the most soothing balm the human spirit has devised - laughter.

Character | Important | Laughter | Life | Life | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Learn |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

Character | Heaven | Man | Men | Music | Play | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |

William Ellery Channing

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no other is, and to do what no other can do.

Character |

William Ellery Channing

There are seasons, in human affairs, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. There are periods when to dare, is the highest wisdom.

Character | Good | Soul | Wants | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

The great duty of God’s children is to love one another. This duty on earth takes the name and form of the law of humanity. We are to recognize all men as brethren, no matter where born, or under what sky, or institution or religion they may live. Every man belongs to the race, and owes a duty to mankind... Men cannot, by combining themselves into narrower or larger societies, sever the sacred, blessed bond which joins them to their kind... The law of humanity must reign; over the assertion of all human rights.

Assertion | Character | Children | Duty | Earth | God | Humanity | Law | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Race | Religion | Rights | Sacred | Blessed |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been men of faith.

Character | Faith | Heart | History | Men | Principles | Skepticism | World |