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

Louis-Aimé Martin

Whatever may be the laws and customs of a country, women always give the tone to morals. Whether slaves or free, they reign, because their empire is that of the affections.

Character |

Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropshitz

There will always be people who criticize the behavior of others, regardless of how great they are or what they do.

Behavior | Character | People | Will |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

What a great deal of ease that man gains who lets his neighbor's behavior alone and takes care that his own actions are honest.

Behavior | Care | Character | Man |

Harry F. Banks, real name possibly Harry Band

Courtesy, kindness, sincerity, truthfulness, thoughtfulness and good manners translated into behavior reflect one's true character.

Behavior | Character | Courtesy | Good | Kindness | Manners | Sincerity |

Frank Chin

In Confucianism, all of us - men and women - are born soldiers. The soldier is the universal individual. No matter what you do for a living - doctor, lawyer, fisherman, thief - you are a fighter. Life is war. The war is to maintain personal integrity in a world that demands betrayal and corruption. All behavior is strategy and tactics. All relationships are martial. Marriages are military alliances.

Behavior | Betrayal | Character | Corruption | Individual | Integrity | Life | Life | Men | War | World |

Erika Chopich and Margaret Paul

All of our controlling behavior - our anger, blame, pouting, teaching, explaining, caretaking, compliance, and denial - comes from believing that we can control what others think of us and how they treat us, and that how they think of us and treat us defines us.

Anger | Behavior | Blame | Character | Compliance | Control | Think |

Stephen Crane

Indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels.

Character | Children | Indifference | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless - nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

Character | Speech |

L. G. Elliott, fully Lloyd George Elliott

Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellows. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter.

Action | Character | Men | People | Respect | Wisdom | Respect |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

It is in those acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look around with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness, calling their denial knowledge.

Character | Earth | Joy | Knowledge | Men | Waste |

Betty Friedan

The blackout of images of women or men visibly over sixty-five, engaged in any vital or productive adult activity, and their replacement by the ‘problem’ of age, is our society’s very definition of age. Age is perceived only as a decline or deterioration from youth.

Age | Character | Men | Society | Youth |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates.

Character | Good | Means | Men | Reason | Religion | Worship |

Anna Jameson

In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.

Capacity | Character | Cowardice | Fear | Hate | Mind | Think |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The relationship between moral action and spiritual knowledge is circular, as it were, and reciprocal. Selfless behavior makes possible an accession of knowledge, and the accession of knowledge makes possible the performance of further and more genuinely selfless actions, which in their turn enhance the agent’s capacity for knowing... A man undertakes right action (which includes, of course, right consciousness and right meditation), and this enables him to catch a glimpse of the Self that underlies his separate individuality. Having seen his own self as the Self, he becomes selfless (and therefore acts selflessly) and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned.

Action | Behavior | Capacity | Character | Consciousness | Individuality | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Meditation | Relationship | Right | Self | Virtue | Virtue |

Robin Lakoff, fully Robin Tolmach Lakoff

The distinction between men’s and women’s language is a symptom of a problem in our culture, not the problem itself. Basically it reflects the fact that men and women are expected to have different interests and different roles, hold different types of conversations, and react differently to other people.

Character | Culture | Distinction | Language | Men | People |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

Behavior | Change | Character | Heart | Morality |

Petra Kelly, fully Petra Karin Kelley

Since human beings have a moral conscience, a spiritual self and a physical self, we can choose among various options. And we are responsible for the consequences of our choices. We can put the common interests of humankind above the conflicts of ideological, racial, religious and national groups. We can bring together thought and feeling, politics and moral values, women and men, the underprivileged and the privileged.... The essence of life is to search for happiness. To realize this end, we must become one with the human family, one with the universe... We should live as if we were to die today. We should die as if we live forever.

Character | Conscience | Consequences | Family | Life | Life | Men | Politics | Search | Self | Thought | Universe | Thought |