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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i.e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

Devil | Love | Man | Poetry |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Books | Boys | Government | Hope | Man | Politics | Will | Government |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The marketÂ… represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them. In a sense, the market is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.

Life | Life | Man | Neglect |

Eugen Drewermann

In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts.

Change | Faith | God | Love | People | Poetry | Talking | Teach | Writing | God |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

It's queer they'd be allowin' the sick ones to read books when I'll bet it's the same lazy readin' in the house bought the half of them down with the consumption itself.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

What we have been saying in regard to imagination and memory, must be applied to contemplation, according as it is referred to either. If it be made to consist in retaining the perceptions; before the use of instituted signs it has only a habit which does not depend on us: but it has none at all, if it be made to consist in preserving the signs themselves.

Design | Fame | Knowledge | Mankind | Memory | Music | Poetry | Religion | Time | Wants |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.

Politics |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Why should a Socialist be discouraged on the eve of the greatest triumph in all the history of the Socialist movement? It is true that these are anxious, trying days for us all — testing days for the women and men who are upholding the banner of labor in the struggle of the working class of all the world against the exploiters of all the world; a time in which the weak and cowardly will falter and fail and desert. They lack the fiber to endure the revolutionary test; they fall away; they disappear as if they had never been. On the other hand, they who are animated by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters in the history of mankind.

Agitation | Capitalism | Mission | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Authority | Family | Nature | Politics |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.

Obsession | Politics | Understand |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

Age | Culture | Evil | Father | God | Loathing | Obedience | Politics | God | Old |

Eugenio Montale

I often think of the beautiful Turin, where sweet must feel to live.

Athletics | Love | Poetry |

Eugenio Montale

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Poetry |

Eugenio Montale

Thick white cloud of moths crazy swirls around the dull lights and on the parapets lays down a blanket on which scricchia like sugar on the footÂ… and the water continues to gnaw the banks and more no one is innocent.

Poetry |

Eugenio Montale

From the Tower falls the sound of bronze: the show goes on between drums argue that the glory of the districts.

Necessity | Poetry | Sound |

Eugenio Montale

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Invention | Poetry | Space |

Eugenio Montale

I do not know how exhausted you resist | in this lake indifference LORD thy heart; maybe you save an amulet that you keep close your lipstick, to down, to file: a white rat,d 'ivory, and so exist!

Poetry | Search |

Eugenio Montale

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Poetry |