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

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

We are never [present with] at home, we are always beyond [ourselves]. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be.

Character | Consideration | Desire | Fear | Future | Hope | Will |

Robert Nathan

Joy has its friends, but grief its loneliness.

Character | Grief | Joy | Loneliness |

John F. Milburn

Fear is like fire: If controlled it will help you; if uncontrolled, it will rise up and destroy you. Men's actions depend a great deal upon fear. We do things either because we enjoy doing them or because we are afraid not to do them. This sort of fear has not relation to physical or moral courage. It is inspired by the knowledge that we are not adequately prepared to face the future and the events it may bring - poverty perhaps, or injury, or death.

Character | Courage | Death | Destroy | Events | Fear | Future | Knowledge | Men | Poverty | Will | Afraid |

Oliver North, fully Lt. Colonel Oliver Laurence North

We are not here to predict the future but to change it for the good.

Change | Character | Future | Good |

Elihu Root

Moral disarmament is to safe-guard the future; material disarmament is to save the present, that there may be a future to safeguard.

Character | Future | Present | Safe |

Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL

Every man is the architect of his own future (fortune).

Character | Fortune | Future | Man |

Sydney Smith

That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward.

Better | Character | Charity | Duty | Future | God | Hope | Ingratitude | Labor | Looks | Man | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Work | World | God |

Christian Friedrich D. Schubert

No one really understands the grief or joy of another.

Character | Grief | Joy |

Judy Tatelbaum

Grief is a wound that needs attention in order to heal. To work through and complete grief means to face our feelings openly and honestly, to express and release our feelings fully and to tolerate and accept our feeling for however long it takes for the wound to heal. We fear that once acknowledged grief will bowl us over. The truth is that grief experienced does dissolve. Grief unexpressed is grief that lasts indefinitely.

Attention | Character | Fear | Feelings | Grief | Means | Order | Truth | Will | Work |

Frederick K. Stamm

When no new thoughts fill the mind - when no horizons beckon - when life is in the past, not in the future - you are on the way to uselessness.

Character | Future | Life | Life | Mind | Past |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.

Future | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided into even the minutes parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all.

Future | Past | Present | Time | Wisdom |

Daniel Webster

Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.

Character | Children | Control | Evil | Future | Habit | Passion | Prejudice | Self | Self-control | Society | Will |

Walter H. Wheeler, Jr.

Our whole free dynamic society’s future depends upon a continued growth of our sense of responsibility and morality in direct proportion to the increase in our material wealth.

Character | Dynamic | Future | Growth | Morality | Responsibility | Sense | Society | Wealth |