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

Aldous Leonard Huxley

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong; and it is in the light of our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct.

Character | Conduct | Light | Nature | Reality | Right | Wrong |

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Character | Fidelity | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Wrong |

John Locke

Madmen... do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.

Character | Ideas | Men | Mistake | Principles | Right | Wrong |

James Russell Lowell

All men who know not where to look for truth, save in the narrow well of self, will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.

Character | Men | Mistake | Self | Truth | Will |

John Locke

The highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.

Care | Character | Liberty | Mistake | Nature | Perfection |

Yeruchem Levovitz, aka The Mashgiach

Who is a righteous man and who is an evil man? Many people think a righteous man is one who does not transgress, and the evil person is one who constantly transgresses. But even the very righteous also transgress and even the very wicked perform good deeds. The essential difference between the two is that a righteous person tries to overcome his desires to do wrong and the evil person does not.

Character | Deeds | Evil | Good | Man | People | Wrong | Think |

Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay

Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.

Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |

George Dennison Prentice

It is undoubtedly true that some people mistake sycophancy for good nature, but it is equally true that man more mistake impertinence for sincerity.

Character | Good nature | Good | Impertinence | Man | Mistake | Nature | People | Sincerity |

Michael Novak

It is a mistake to base one’s hopes for happiness upon the enforcement of security and equality. In principle, both desires are insatiable... No individual or society is secure in a world of emergent probability and sin... To exercise liberty is to take risks, to embrace uncertainties.

Character | Equality | Individual | Liberty | Mistake | Security | Sin | Society | World | Society | Happiness |

William Morley Punshon

Speak the truth by all means; be bold and fearless in your rebuke of error, and in your keener rebuke of wrong doing; but be human, and loving, and gentle, and brotherly the while.

Character | Error | Means | Rebuke | Truth | Wrong |

Publius Syrus

Suspicion breeds rivals for herself... The suspicious man condemns the good faith of all... Suspicion is an unspoken wrong to tested worth.

Character | Faith | Good | Man | Suspicion | Worth | Wrong |

W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross

It would be a mistake to found a natural science on ‘what we really think’ ... opinions are interpretations, and often misinterpretations, of sense-experience; and the man of science must appeal from these to sense-experience itself, which furnishes his real data. In ethics no such appeal is possible... the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a natural science.

Character | Convictions | Ethics | Experience | Man | Mistake | People | Science | Sense |

Christopher A. Smart

The one and only serious mistake is to be afraid of making mistakes.

Character | Mistake | Afraid |