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

Ronald S. Miller

Perhaps more than any other single factor, the intimate alchemy between the healer and the patient helps mobilize the body's natural resources. The mere presence of a healer often evokes hope in the patient and an expectation of recovery. When the two people create a partnership based on compassion, trust, and shared decision-making, and when the relationship nurtures the patient's hope for a positive outcome, even seemingly incurable diseases sometimes go into remission.... insistently restoring the human heart to the practice of medicine. Rather than treating patients as disease processes, they risk bringing their full humanness to the therapeutic encounter. They not only call on their technological expertise, but on the inner qualities practiced by healers from time immemorial: patience, humility, compassion, and an ability to inspire and mobilize their patients' healing resources.

Ability | Alchemy | Body | Compassion | Decision | Disease | Expectation | Heart | Hope | Humility | Patience | People | Practice | Qualities | Relationship | Risk | Time | Trust | Expectation |

Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

The failure of the mind in old age is often less the results of natural decay, than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment bring indolence, and indolence decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy.

Age | Ambition | Contentment | Death | Disease | Ennui | Failure | Indolence | Men | Mind | Old age | Power | Ambition | Failure | Old |

Thomas Fuller

Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. To much overcharges nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. It is thought, and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.

Books | Disease | Health | Mind | Nature | Reading | Thought |

Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog

The safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as its sends physical disease after physical trespasses.

Belief | Creed | Disease | Morality | Nature | Order | Speculation |

Emmet Fox

There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love will not open.

Difficulty | Disease | Enough | Love | Will |

Ethiopian Proverbs

He who conceals his disease cannot expect to be cured.

Disease |

George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

He who has got rid of the disease "Tomorrow" has the possibility to attain what he is here for.

Disease |

Hans Zinnser

Infectious disease is one of the great tragedies of living things - the struggle for existence between two different forms of life... Incessantly, the pitiless war goes on, without quarter or armistice - a nationalism of species against species.

Disease | Existence | Struggle | War |

Herman E. Daly

Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage

Disease | Wants |

Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL

It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.

Disease | Important |

James Allen

Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought... The people who live in fear of disease are the people who get it... Change of diet will not help a man who will not change his thoughts. When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food... Clean thoughts make clean habits.

Change | Diet | Disease | Fear | Man | People | Will |

Jerome K. Jerome, fully Jerome Klapka Jerome

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.

Disease | Suffering |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be. The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that might prove fatal, that may end in disaster. The pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.

Disease | Problems | Question |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Our community is in spiritual distress, and some of our organizations are often too concerned with digits. Our disease is a loss of character and commitment, and the cure of our plight cannot be derived from charts and diagrams.

Character | Disease | Loss |

John Maynard Keynes

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Avarice | Disease | Life | Life | Little | Love of money | Love | Means | Money | Necessity | Position | Principles | Qualities | Time | Wealth | Will |

Junius, psyeudonym of unknown English Political Writer NULL

The vices operate like age, bring on disease before its time and in the prime of youth, leave the character broken and exhausted.

Character | Disease | Time |

Kate Millet, Katherine Murray Millett

The entire construct of the "medical model" of "mental illness"What is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatry: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs—in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity—in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.

Behavior | Disease | Mind |

Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn

Six Declines of Modern Youth: Decline of Fitness due to modern methods of locomotion [moving about];Decline of Initiative and Enterprise due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis; Decline of Memory and Imagination due to the confused restlessness of modern life; Decline of Skill and Care due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship; Decline of Self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of stimulants and tranquilizers; And worst of all: Decline of Compassion due to the unseemly haste with which modern life is conducted or as William Temple called "spiritual death".

Care | Compassion | Disease | Haste | Imagination | Initiative | Life | Life | Memory | Restlessness | Skill | Tradition |

Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan

Whether our task is fighting poverty, stemming the spread of disease or saving innocent lives from mass murder, we have seen that we cannot succeed without the leadership of the strong and the engagement of all

Disease | Fighting | Engagement | Leadership |