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

Walter Brueggemann

The contemporary abrasion between imperial ideology and poetic alternative is a contentious one, with the poetic alternative being fragile and mostly unauthorized and unrecognized.

Capitalism | Church | Force |

Walter Lippmann

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

Attention | Devotion | Force | Inactivity |

Walter Lippmann

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness.

Belief | Example | Force | Humanity | Wisdom |

Walter Lippmann

Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.

Force | Majority | Rule | War |

Walter Brueggemann

The hope filled language of prophecy in cutting through the royal despair and hopelessness is the language of amazement... the language of amazement is the ultimate energizer.

Battle | Cause | Challenge | Energy | Freedom | Language | Reality | Universe | Will |

Walter Savage Landor

In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

Enough | Force | Modesty | Pleasure |

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible situation, and you have to make your language work so as to come clear all by itself, with no existential context. The need for this exquisite circumspection makes writing the agonizing work it commonly is.

Force | Giving | Precision | Words | Precision |

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

For, although, as Eliot justly maintains in [his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”], works of literature are “not the expression of personality but an escape from personality,” and in this are unlike ordinary dialogue, they are nevertheless not quite an escape to an object, a thing adequately conceivable, even analogously, in terms of surfaces and visual or tactile perceptions. Works of literature consist in words, and, as we have suggested, words themselves retain in themselves ineluctably something of the interiority of their birth within that interior which is a person. As cries, they go “out,” but they are not extensions of, or projections of interiority. In this sense Camus’s and Sartre’s view of man as an interior exteriorizing itself is quite inadequate to the totality of the human situation. We are more accurate if we keep our metaphors closer to the world of sound and think of speech and of works of literature as “amplifications” or, better, as intensifications of an interior. All words projected from a speaker remain, as has been seen, somehow interior to him, being an invitation to another person, another interior, to share the speaker’s interior, and invitation to enter in, not to regard from the outside.

Experience | Man | Thought | Universe | Think | Thought |

Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.

Style | Universe | Vision | Leader | Leadership |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

Good | Judgment | Universe |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Shift from a human doing to a human being.

Body | Love | Mind | Universe | Work |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Force | Trust |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Develop a conviction in your heart that prosperity truly belongs to you.

Means | Trust | Universe |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Everything that exists in the world, does so independently of your opinion about it.

Desire | Universe |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you'll come to remember your spirit. When you're able to transcend an aversion to silence, you'll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated.

Commitment | Respect | Universe | Respect |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

A non-doer is very often a critic – that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.

Force | Mind |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

The unseen energy that was once in Shakespeare or Picasso or Galileo or any human form, is also available to all of us. That is because the spirit energy does not die, it simply changes form.

Nothing | Universe |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

There is always something beautiful to be experienced wherever you are. Right now, look around you and select beauty as your focus.

Purpose | Purpose | Universe |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Teach children that stress comes from the way in which they think and not from people or life situations.

Desire | Force | Life | Life |