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

Walter Bagehot

Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Better | Change | Grave | Lord | Nature | People | Politics | World | Crisis |

Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Poetry |

Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

The aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achievement.

Assertion | Life | Life | Poetry | Sense |

Walter Savage Landor

He who praises a good book becomingly, is next in merit to the author.

Better | Ideas | Life | Life | Poetry | Words |

Walter Savage Landor

Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak four not exempt from pride some future day. Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek, over my open volume you will say, 'this man loved me'—then rise and trip away.

Poetry |

Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

Art | Art |

Walter Savage Landor

It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.

Poetry | Sense |

Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

I can never see my old friend again— the river Han still streams to the east I might question some old man of his place— river and hills—empty is Tsaichou.

Love | Poverty |

Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed that by what it achieved.

Poetry | Present | Intellect |

Walter Mondale, fully Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale

Mr. Reagan will raise taxes; and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

Fairness | Politics | Television |

Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

Art | Beauty | Poetry | Art | Beauty |

Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

With a vision, the executive provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization.

People | Poetry |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

If you knew who walked beside you at all times, on the path that you have chosen, you could never experience fear or doubt again.

Energy |

Washington Irving

It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet.

Battle | Daughter | Faith | Marriage | Poetry | Prowess | Rites | Satire | Surrender |

Wendell Berry

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.

Control | Dependence | Economics | Era | Failure | Freedom | Need | Nothing | People | Politics | Rationality | Society | System | Will | World | Worry | Society | Failure |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh there is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

Experience | Obscurity | Obscurity | People | Poetry |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that his grave went without a tomb-stone twenty-six years. . . today in danger of becoming the life study of a few professors.

Politics | Practice |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

The friends who met here and embraced are gone, each to his own mistake.

Men | Poetry |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an elite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

Poetry |