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

Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie

If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk.

Dynamic |

Evelyn Underhill

If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time.

Better | Circumstances | Consideration | Desire | Gentleness | Life | Life | Strength | Will |

Evelyn Underhill

When you let intuition have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most practical of all activities.

Charity | Desire | Events | God | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Reality | God |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

Civilization | Force | Man | Wishes | Work |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

Life | Life | Need |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them -- a diminishing number in my case.

Evan Esar

Shakespeare murdered Hamlet, and a great many Hamlets have murdered Shakespeare.

Ends | Man |

Evelyn Underhill

The business and method of mysticism is love.

Important | Life | Life | Reading | Sense | Wonder |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.

Reason |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

The langor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

Chance | Heaven | Knowing | Man | Soul | World |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

Man | Woman | Youth | Youth |

Evan Esar

Many a man who goes to Las Vegas to get away from it all soon finds that Las Vegas gets it all away from him.

Love | Man | Mistake |

Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie

And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue - you know - of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. And I just couldn't quite accept that.

Will |

Evelyn Underhill

"I come to seek God because I need Him," may be an adequate formula for prayer. "I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet," is the only possible formula for worship.

Individuality |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.

Experience | Time |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It's a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

Life | Life |

Evelyn Underhill

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.

Contrast | Life | Life | Little | Need | Oratory | Rights | Sense | Wants | Will |