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

Jean Bethke Elshtain

People who routinely insist on the illegitimacy of blaming victims now do it. No one deserved what happened to them on September 11, neither the immediate victims and their families nor the country itself. Cannot a powerful country bleed? Are not its citizens as mortal as those anywhere? Simple human recognition along these lines does not deter the literary theorist Frederic Jameson from seeing in these horrific events "a textbook example of dialectical reversal."

Events | Example | Mortal |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

God manifests Himself in events rather than in things, and these events can never be captured or localized in things.

Events |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere. Highest in the list of virtues, this anxious caring extends not only to the moral sphere but to all realms of life, to oneself and to others, to words and to thoughts, to events and to deeds. Unawed by the prevailing narrowness of mind, it persists as an attitude toward the whole of reality; to hold small things great, to take light matters seriously, to think of the common and the passing from the aspect of the lasting.

Care | Events | Light | Wonder | Words | Think |

John Taylor Gatto

Education is not just learning dates and events from history but learning to apply the lessons of lives well lived and lives poorly lived -- and how to tell the difference.

Events | History | Learning |

Joseph Campbell

It seems to have had an order, to have been composed by someone, and those events that were merely accidental when they happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. Who composed this plot? Just as your dreams are composed, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Just as the people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been the agent in the structuring of other lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, everything influencing and structuring everything else. It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all of the dream characters are dreaming too. And so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature…It is as though there were an intention behind it yet it is all by chance. None of us lives the life that he had intended.

Chance | Dreams | Events | Intention | Life | Life | People | Will |

Jean de La Bruyère

Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live.

Death | Events |

L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Better that the nation grow poor for a cause we can honor, than grow rich for an end that is unknown. Who can regard without deep misgiving the process of accumulating wealth unaccompanied by a corresponding growth of knowledge as to the uses to which wealth must be applied? This is what we see in normal times, and the spectacle is profoundly disturbing. Far less disturbing at all events is that process of spending the wealth which we have now to witness.

Cause | Events | Growth | Knowledge | Misgiving | Regard | Wealth |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

Attention | Events | Majority | People | Reality | Time |

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein

I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one's own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day.

Duty | Events | Impatience | Man | Present | Will | Understand |

Louise L. Hay

All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by your thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past.

Events |

Helena Blavatsky, aka Helena Petrovna "H.P." Blavatsky or Madame Blavatsky, born Helena von Hahn

If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them.

Events | Past |

Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny.

Events | Wishes |

M. C. Swabey, fully Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.

Events | Giving | Important | Light | Men | Past | Present | Time |

Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper

Man liveth from hour to hour, and knoweth not what may happen; Influences circle him on all sides, and yet must he answer for his actions: For the being that is master of himself, bendeth events to his will, But a slave to selfish passions is the wavering creature of circumstance.

Events | Wavering |

Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair... The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

Art | Better | Cause | Events | Good | Hope | Misfortune | People | Practice | Style | Misfortune | Art |

Mary Antin, fully Mary Antin Grabau

My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities.

Events |

Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash

We all have failures, some little ones and some big ones. But it is very important to have a firm conviction that is not what happened to us that is important - it's the way we react to what happens to us We can't control the events of our lives, but we can control out reactions to those events.

Control | Events | Important | Little |

Max Planck, fully Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

We must, however, not deceive ourselves – this naive belief does not exist nowadays even among common people, and it cannot be revived by backwards oriented (rückwärts gerichtete) considerations and measures. Since to believe means to consider something true (fürwahrhalten), and the growing knowledge of the nature, proceeding forwards incessantly along incontestably reliable path, had led to the result that for a man educated at least slightly in natural sciences it is entirely (schlechterdings) impossible to consider as reliable many reports about extraordinary events contradicting natural laws, about miracles (Naturwunder) which used to be generally accepted as essential support and confirmation (Bekräftigung) of religious teachings and which people considered formerly as facts without critical examination (Bedenken). The one who takes his religion really seriously and cannot tolerate that it gets into contradiction with his knowledge (Wissen), is facing the question of conscience whether he can still honestly consider himself to be a member of religious community which in its confession (Bekenntnis) contains belief in miracles. For a certain period of time many a believer could find a kind of reconciliation in an effort to take the middle way and to restrict his belief to acceptance (Anerkennung) of few miracles, considered to be extremely important. However, such a position is not tenable for a long time. The belief in miracles must retreat step by step before relentlessly and reliably progressing science and we cannot doubt that sooner or later it must vanish completely (zu Ende gehen muss).

Acceptance | Belief | Conscience | Contradiction | Doubt | Effort | Events | Knowledge | Man | Means | Miracles | People | Position | Question | Reconciliation | Religion | Science | Time |

Michel Foucault

There is no process of evolution in which duration introduces new events of itself and at its own insistence; time is integrated as a nosological constant, not as an organic variable. The time of the body does not affect, and still less determines, the time of the disease.

Body | Events | Evolution | Organic | Time |

Michel Foucault

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Birth | Books | Earth | Events | Ideas | Rule | Teach | World |