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

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

You ask that Mr. Taft shall let the world know what his religious belief is. This is purely his own private concern; it is a matter between him and his Maker, a matter for his own conscience; and to require it to be made public under penalty of political discrimination is to negative the first principles of our Government, which guarantee complete religious liberty, and the right to each to act in religious affairs as his own conscience dictates. Mr. Taft never asked my advice in the matter, but if he had asked it, I should have emphatically advised him against thus stating publicly his religious belief. The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.

Ability | Business | Cleanliness | Courage | Duty | Good | Honesty | Intention | Man | Men | People | Public | Qualities | Righteousness | Truth | Weakness | Will | Work | Business |

Thich Nhất Hanh

A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.

Meditation | Necessity | Time | Friends |

Thich Nhất Hanh

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

Fear | Mindfulness | Order | Practice |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

Energy | Mindfulness |

Thich Nhất Hanh

I promise myself that I will enjoy every minute of the day that is given me to live.

Mindfulness | Practice |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Mindful breathing is the vehicle that you use to go back to your true home where you meet the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Mindful breathing brings you home--it generates the energy of mindfulness in you. Mindfulness is the substance of a Buddha.

Means | Meditation | Right |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Your smile affirms your awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. How many days slip by in forgetfulness? What are you doing with your life? Look deeply, and smile. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind.

Practice | Present | Right | Will |

Thich Nhất Hanh

You can practice deep listening in order to relieve the suffering in us, and in the other person. That kind of listening is described as compassionate listening. You listen only for the purpose of relieving suffering in the other person.

Existence | Nothing | Search | Universe |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Mindfulness helps you to touch the wonders of life for self-nourishment and healing.

Time | Happiness |

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

Sufficient to each day are the duties to be done and the trials to be endured. God never built a Christian strong enough to carry today's duties and tomorrow's anxieties piled on the top of them.

Joy |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of non-being, the fear of annihilation.

Earth | Present |

Thomas Brooks

Such as have made a considerable improvement of their gifts and graces, have hearts as large as their heads; whereas most men's heads have outgrown their hearts.

Fear | Man | Poverty | Salvation | Scripture | Search |

Thomas Carlyle

Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this? Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare's morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!

Man | Nature | Will | Old |

Thomas Campbell

Brougham delivered a very warm panegyric upon the ex-Chancellor, and expressed a hope that he would make a good end, although to an expiring Chancellor death was now armed with a new terror.

Thomas Campbell

Without the smile from partial beauty won, Oh what were man?—a world without a sun.

Beauty | Love | World | Beauty |

Thomas Campbell

And what the actor could effect, the scholar could presage.

Beauty | Love | Smile | World | Beauty |

Thomas Campbell

Sorrow returned with the dawning of morn, and the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.

Heart | Child |

Thomas Chalmers

The public! The public! How many fools does it require to make the public?

Existence | Man | Nothing | Popularity | Worth |

Thomas D'Urfey

The worth of a thing is known by its want.

Art | Cunning | Day | Devil | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Man | Wife | Will | Woman | Words | Art |

Thomas Hobbes

Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

Power |