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

Eliyahu de Vidas,

When your property or possessions sustain some damage or loss, work on yourself to accept the Almighty’s judgment with love. Realize you were born without any belongings and you will eventually leave the world without belongings. You need not identify with your possessions since they are not an integral part of you.

Character | Judgment | Love | Need | Possessions | Property | Will | Work | World |

Helen Gahagan Douglas

Character isn’t inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.

Action | Anger | Character | Fear | Hate | Mind | Self | Thought | Thought |

Abba Eban, born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban

The vital force in business life is the honest desire to serve. Business, it is said, is the science of service. He profits most who serves best. At the very bottom of the wish to render service must be honesty of purpose, and, as I go along through life, I see more and more that honesty in word, thought, and work means success. It spells a life worth living and in business clean success.

Business | Character | Desire | Force | Honesty | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Science | Service | Success | Thought | Work | Worth | Business |

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

Repentance, to be of any avail, must work a change of heart and conduct.

Change | Character | Conduct | Heart | Repentance | Wisdom | Work |

Charles W. Eliot

Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful, and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.

Character | Happy | Thought | Usefulness | Think | Thought |

Orville Dewey

How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding would be untied by one word spoken in simple and confiding truth of heart! How many a solitary place would be made glad if love were there, and how many a dark dwelling would be filled with light!

Character | Circumstances | Existence | Future | Life | Life | Love | Mystery | Teach | Truth |

Dubner Magid, name for Rabbi Jacob ben wolf Krantz

A major cause of many people’s sadness is their lack of attaining things they could live without.

Cause | Character | People | Sadness |

Albert Einstein

Exaggerated respect for athletics, an excess of coarse impressions brought about by the technical discoveries of recent years, the increased severity of the struggle for existence due to the economic crisis, the brutalization of political life: all these factors are hostile to the ripening of the character and the desire for real culture, and stamp our age as barbarous, materialistic and superficial.

Age | Athletics | Character | Culture | Desire | Excess | Existence | Life | Life | Respect | Struggle | Respect |

Tyron Edwards

Give work rather than alms to the poor. The former drives out indolence, the latter industry. There are two kinds of charity, remedial and preventative. The former is often injurious in its tendency; the latter is always praiseworthy and beneficial.

Alms | Character | Charity | Indolence | Industry | Work |

Tyron Edwards

We never reach our ideals, whether of mental or moral improvement, but the thought of them shows us our deficiencies, and spurs us on to higher and better things.

Better | Character | Ideals | Improvement | Thought | Thought |

Philip Doddridge

He is the wisest and happiest man who, by constant attention of thought discovers the greatest opportunity of doing good, and breaks through every opposition that he may improve these opportunities.

Attention | Character | Good | Man | Opportunity | Opposition | Thought | Thought |

Tyron Edwards

Sincerity is no test of truth - no evidence of correctness of conduct. You may take poison sincerely believing it the needed medicine, but will it save your life?

Character | Conduct | Correctness | Evidence | Life | Life | Sincerity | Truth | Will |

Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character

Character | Dread | Man | Need | Work |

Declaration of Independence NULL

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Self | Truths |

Albert Einstein

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

Beauty | Character | Duty | Influence | Joy | Opportunity | Regard | Spirit | Study | Work | Beauty | Learn |

James W. Elliot

Work is life and good work is good life.

Character | Good | Life | Life | Wisdom | Work |

Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

Originality and the feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.

Character | Dignity | Originality | Struggle | Work |