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

Wendell Berry

I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.

Earth | Life | Life | Man | Understanding | Work | World |

Wendell Berry

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.

Day | Life | Life | Light | Present | Right | Time | Vision | Will | Words | World | Think |

Wendell Berry

We could say that the human race is a great co-authorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.

Day | Fighting | Man | Need | Question | Think |

Walker Percy

Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest?

Man | Nothing |

Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the will of things.

Reality | Words |

Wallace Stevens

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend on one another, as a man depends on a woman, day on night, the imagined on the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace and forth the particulars of rapture come.

Peace |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

No one snowflake ever feels responsible for the avalanche.

Revenge |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.

Man | Understand |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

We offer up prayers to God only because we have made Him after our own image. We treat Him like a Pasha, or a Sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

Distinguish |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it

Talent |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

I am risking my life for my work, and half my reason has gone.

Consciousness | Danger | Haste | Mind | Work | Danger |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Punctuality is one of the minor virtues which we do not acquire until later in life.

Desire | Fame | Health | Men | Will |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.

Critic | Feelings | Important | Life | Life | Worship | Value |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

Language | Public | Learn |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

Force | Truth |

Václav Havel

Modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy — that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.

Knowing | People | Reading | Will |

Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming

The universe seems silent and unmoving, yet its natural functions never cease. The sun and moon hurry along day and night, yet their brightness never diminishes. By the same token, the noble person is alert while at leisure, and makes time for tasteful pursuits when busy with duties.

Anger | Behavior |

Turkish Proverbs

If the bald man knew a remedy he would rub it on his own head.

Listening |