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

Adolfo Barcella

Unrequited love is the meaning of life. We’re here to love but not to be loved, to give but not receive. Our mission in this world is to improve humanity and leave a better history than we found. Only selfless love has such power. Only love without interest or expectation of reward can change human beings... To give love without receiving love is the truest love and brings the greatest happiness there is in life.

Better | Change | Character | Expectation | History | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mission | Power | Receive | Reward | World | Expectation | Happiness |

Shana Alexander, fully Shana Agar Alexander

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

Character | Excellence | People | Truth | Excellence |

Ahad HaAm, pen name, born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg

Whoever sets out to persuade men to accept a new idea, or one which seems to be new, not just as an idea, but as a truth that is felt, should know beforehand that the human mind is not a blank sheet, on which one an write with ease, and should not therefore grieve or despair when he finds that people do not pay attention to him.

Attention | Character | Despair | Men | Mind | People | Truth |

William Arthur

The regeneration of a sinner is an evidence of power in the highest sphere - moral nature; with the highest prerogative - to change nature; and operating to the highest result - not to create originally, which is great; but to create anew, which is greater.

Change | Character | Evidence | Nature | Power |

H. B.

The first real mental illumination I remember to have experienced was when I saw that the universe exists in each of its individual atoms - that is, the universe is the result of a few simple processes infinitely repeated. When a drop of water has been mathematically measured, every principle will have been used which would be called form in the measurement of the heavens. All life on the globe is sustained by digestion and assimilation; when by voluntary and traumatic action these stop death follows. The history of an individual mind is the history of the race. Know one thing in its properties and relations and you will know all things.

Action | Character | Death | History | Individual | Life | Life | Mind | Race | Universe | Will |

Arthur Aughey

Faith without evidence is, properly, not faith, but prejudice or presumption; faith beyond evidence is superstition, and faith contrary to evidence is either insanity or willful perversity of mind.

Character | Evidence | Faith | Insanity | Mind | Prejudice | Presumption | Superstition |

Richard Baxter

Use sin as it will use you; spare it not, for it will not spare you; it is your murderer, and the murderer of the whole world. Use it, therefore, as a murderer should be used; kill it before it kills you; and though it brings you to the grave, as it did your head, it shall not be able to keep you there. You love not death; love not the cause of death.

Cause | Character | Death | Grave | Kill | Love | Sin | Will | World |

Roy I. Bagley

Right thinking is a prerequisite to right living... In truth the destiny of any life is determined by what fills that mind.

Character | Destiny | Life | Life | Mind | Right | Thinking | Truth | Wisdom |

Francis Ellington Abbot

Just as a tested and rugged virtue of the moral hero is worth more than the lovely, tender, untried innocence of the child, so is the massive strength of a soul that has conquered truth for itself worth more than the soft peach-bloom faith of a soul that takes truth on trust.

Character | Faith | Hero | Innocence | Soul | Strength | Trust | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Worth |

Herbert Sebastian Agar

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

Character | Men | Truth |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Once thing here is worth a great deal, to pass thy life in truth and justice, with a benevolent disposition even to liars and unjust men.

Character | Justice | Life | Life | Men | Truth | Worth |

George Bancroft

Beauty, like truth and justice, lives within us; like virtue, and like moral law, it is a companion of the soul.

Beauty | Character | Justice | Law | Moral law | Soul | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Hermann Boerhaave

The great seal of truth is simplicity.

Character | Simplicity | Truth | Wisdom |

John Albert Broadus

All the sin that has darkened human life an saddened human history began in believing in a falsehood.

Character | Falsehood | History | Life | Life | Sin |

Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke

The simple truth is, that there has lived on the earth, “appearing at intervals,” for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.

Absence | Character | Death | Earth | Future | Life | Life | Little | Men | Nothing | Race | Time | Truth | Will |

Phillips Brooks

It is better to inspire the heart with a noble sentiment than to teach the mind a truth of science.

Better | Character | Heart | Mind | Science | Sentiment | Teach | Truth |