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

Emil M. Cioran

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Decision | Life | Life |

Emil M. Cioran

To foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

Decision | Faith | Man | Protest |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Decision | People |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

Decision |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The emotion you feel is always about the vibrational variance between where you want to be and where you are. If you're out of balance, there are only two ways to bring yourself into alignment - either raise your expectation to match your desire, or lower your desire to match your expectation.

Decision | Discipline | Important | Nothing |

Eugene Peterson

Neither prophets nor priests nor psalmists offer quick cures for the suffering: we don’t find any of them telling us to take a vacation, use this drug, get a hobby. Nor do they ever engage in publicity cover-ups, the plastic-smile propaganda campaigns that hide trouble behind a billboard of positive thinking. None of that the suffering is held up and proclaimed – and prayed.

Decision | God | Security | God |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on the way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it, and so did Frau Dressler's guests.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Consideration | Decision | Impression |

Italian Proverbs

To promise and give nothing is comfort for a fool.

Decision | Think |

Italian Proverbs

The soldier is well paid for doing mischief.

Administration | Decision | Global | Health | Policy | Right | Rights | Struggle |