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

David Hume

To be happy, the temperament must be cheerful and gay, not gloomy and melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy, is real riches; one to fear and sorrow is real poverty.

Fear | Happy | Hope | Joy | Melancholy | Poverty | Riches | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Jamake Highwater

Art is a staple of mankind - never a by-product of elitism. So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sing of life when every other aspect of civilization fails... Like hunger and sex, it is a disposition of the human cell - a marvelous fiction of the brain which recreates itself as something as mysterious as mind. Art is consistent with every aspect of every day in the life of every people.

Art | Civilization | Day | Hunger | Life | Life | Mankind | Mind | People | Wisdom | Art |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness; and laughter is on top of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

Despair | God | Laughter | Madness | Mirth | Reason | Sorrow | Tears | Wisdom |

David Hume

Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.

Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |

Washington Irving

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude… The love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.

Affliction | Duty | Love | Solitude | Sorrow | Wisdom |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise.

Disguise | Melancholy | Mirth | Wisdom |

Victor Hugo

Happiness is a thing of gravity. It seeks for hearts of bronze, and carves itself there slowly; pleasure startles it away by tossing flowers to it. Joy's smile is much more close to tears than it is to laughter.

Joy | Laughter | Pleasure | Smile | Tears | Wisdom |

Washington Irving

How easy it is for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him; and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles!

Heart | Pleasure | Wisdom |

Frederick Dan Huntington

If we do not know what the sorrow of penitence is, we have been living only on the surface of life - unmindful of its deep realities, unconscious of its grander glories.

Life | Life | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

The chief pleasure (in eating) does not consist in costly seasoning or exquisite flavor, but in yourself. Do you seek for sauce by sweating.

Pleasure | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences.

Consequences | Dread | Men | Pleasure | Wisdom | World |

Sol Hurok, fully Solomon Isiaevich Hurok; born Solomon Izrailevich Gurkov

Get pleasure out of life... as much as you can. No one ever died from pleasure.

Life | Life | Pleasure | Wisdom |

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions.

Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Soul | Wavering | Wisdom |