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

Aldous Leonard Huxley

God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of all the rest is to run into grave spiritual peril... The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness... The complete transformation of consciousness, which is “enlightenment,” “deliverance,” “salvation,” comes only when God is thought of as the perennial Philosophy affirms Him to be - immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal - and when religious practices are adapted to this conception.

Character | Conduct | Consciousness | Enlightenment | God | Grave | Little | Nothing | Peril | Philosophy | Rest | Salvation | Thought | God | Thought |

Thomas Jefferson

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Character | Power | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Character | Control | Discretion | Education | Enough | People | Safe | Society | Society | Think |

William James

Instinctive reactions and emotional expressions thus shade imperceptibly into each other. Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well.

Character | Instinct | Object |

Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange

Men are not to be judged by their looks, habits, and appearances; but by the character of their lives and conversations, and by their works. It is better to be praised by one's own works than by the words of another.

Better | Character | Looks | Men | Words |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

The manner of giving shows the character of the giver more than the gift itself.

Character | Giving |

Alexander Macleod

The influence of individual character extends from generation to generation. The world is molded by it.

Character | Individual | Influence | World |

George Henry Lewes

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstances, it would be nearer the mark to say man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance.

Character | Circumstances | Existence | Man |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

An ardent love and admiration of virtue seems to imply the existence of something opposite to it, and it seems highly probably that the same beauty of form and substance, the same perfection of character could not be generated without the impressions of disapprobation which arise from the spectacle of moral evil.

Admiration | Beauty | Character | Evil | Existence | Love | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

All else failing, a man's character may be inferred from nothing so surely as the jest he takes in bad part.

Character | Man | Nothing |

Henry Edward Manning

Our character is our will; for what we will we are.

Character | Will |