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

Hannah Arendt

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Experience | Indispensable | Love | Mistake | People |

Henry Ward Beecher

Do not be afraid because the community teems with excitement. Silence and death are dreadful. The rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, the conflict of realities, invigorate, cleanse, and establish the truth.

Death | Excitement | Life | Life | Men | Silence | Truth | Afraid |

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under the ground.

Gold | Mistake | Style | Thought |

Henry James

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter so much what you do in particular, so long as you're living your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

Life | Life | Mistake |

Henry Van Dyke

There is no conflict between the Old and the New; the conflict is between the False and the True.

Old |

Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL

All things come into being by conflict of opposites.

James A. Garfield

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

Cost | War |

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, Sir John Lubbock

If wealth is to be valued because it gives leisure, clearly it would be a mistake to sacrifice leisure in the struggle for wealth.

Leisure | Mistake | Sacrifice | Struggle | Wealth |

Karl Marx

In the social production of their existence, human beings necessarily enter into determinate relations, independent of their will, relations of production, corresponding to a given stage of development of their material productive powers. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and tow which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness. the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and spiritual life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive powers of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same things in terms of right - with the property relations in the framework of which they have thus far operated. From forms of development of the productive powers these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

Consciousness | Era | Existence | Life | Life | Property | Revolution | Right | Society | Will | Society |

Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek

Don't mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs.

Mistake | Pleasure |

Karen Horney, born Danielsen

It would not be going too far to assert that… conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and hwo is… unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity.

Daring | Woman |

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma

All occurrences of violence, negativity, conflict crisis, or problems in any society are just the expression of growth of stress in collective consciousness. When the level of stress becomes sufficiently great, it bursts out into large-scale violence, war, and civil uprising necessitating military action.

Action | Consciousness | Growth | Problems | Society | War | Society |

Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

God’s never tied man’s salvation to any pattern. Whatever possibilities inhere in any pattern of life inhere in all, because God has given it so and denied it to none. One good way does not conflict with another, for not all people may travel the same road.

God | Good | Life | Life | Man | People | Salvation | God |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

There are two opposite tendencies in evolution: changes that lead toward harmony (i.e., the ability to obtain energy through cooperation, and through the utilization of unused or wasted energy); and those that lead toward entropy (or ways of obtaining energy for one’s purposes through exploiting other organisms, thereby causing conflict and disorder.)

Ability | Cooperation | Energy | Evolution | Harmony |

Parke Godwin

The true source of cheerfulness is benevolence. The pursuits of mankind are commonly frigid and contemptible, and the mistake comes, at last, to be detected. But virtue is a charm that never fades. The soul that perceptually overflows with kindness and sympathy will always be cheerful.

Benevolence | Cheerfulness | Kindness | Mankind | Mistake | Soul | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue | Will |

Philip James Bailey

Who can mistake great thoughts? They seize upon the mind; arrest and search and shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind; rush over it like rivers over reeds.

Mind | Mistake | Search | Soul |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness; and I pronounce it as certain that there was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

Man | Mistake | Time | Think |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Mistake |

Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh

Eat slowly; only men in rags and gluttons old in sin mistake themselves for carpet-bags and tumble victuals in.

Men | Mistake | Sin | Old |