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

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

'Tis better to profit by a horrible example than to be one.

Better | Character | Example |

Joseph Parker

No true manhood can be trained by a merely intellectual process. You cannot train men by the intellect alone; you must train them by the heart.

Character | Heart | Men | Intellect |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

It behooves a father to be virtuous if he expects his son to be more virtuous than he has been.

Character | Father |

Plotinus NULL

It is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state.

Character | Conduct | Morality | Nature | Right | Soul |

Nicholas Rescher

Reason itself... demands that we recognize the limited place of the virtues of cognition, inquiry, and the cerebral side of life. An adequate account of rationality must rightly stress its importance and primacy while recognizing that the intellectual virtues are only limited components of the good life.

Character | Good | Inquiry | Life | Life | Rationality | Reason |

Lord Samuel, Herbert Louis Samuel, First Viscount Samuel

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

Character | Doubt | Morality | Myth |

Charles Seymour

Consideration is not merely a matter of emotional goodwill but of intellectual vigor and moral self-sacrifice. Wisdom must combine with sympathy. That is why consideration underlies the phrase "a scholar and a gentleman," which really sums up the ideal of the output of a college education.

Character | Consideration | Education | Sacrifice | Scholar | Self | Self-sacrifice | Sympathy | Wisdom |

Elizabeth Anscombe, fully Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret "G. E. M." Anscombe

You cannot take any performance (even an interior performance) as itself an act of intention; for if you describe a performance, the fact that it has taken place is not a proof of intention; words for example may occur in somebody’s mind without his meaning them. so intention is never a performance in the mind, though in some matters a performance in the mind which is seriously meant may make a difference to the correct account of the man’s action - e.g., in embracing someone. But the matters in question are necessarily ones in which outward acts are ‘significant’ in some way.

Action | Example | Intention | Man | Meaning | Mind | Question | Wisdom | Words |