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

Ezra Taft Benson

One good yardstick as to whether a person might be the right one for you is this: in her presence, do you think your noblest thoughts, do you aspire to your finest deeds, do you wish you were better than you are?

Appearance | Change | Character | Day | Disgrace | Heart | Important | Injustice | Injustice | Joy | Lesson | Pain | Parents | Peace | Play | Resolution | Understanding | Circumstance | Teacher |

Faith Popcorn, born Faith Plotkin

We do a lot of brainstorming with our talent base of 6,500 experts globally,

Day | People | Power | Trouble |

Felix Adler

The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth.

Criticism | Desire | Doubt | Faith | Improvement | Individual | Life | Life | Nations | Regard | Sacred | Intellect |

Ezra Taft Benson

May we be wise — prayerfully wise — in the electing of those who would lead us. May we select only those who understand and will adhere to constitutional principles. To do so, we need to understand these principles ourselves… We should understand the Constitution as the founders meant that it should be understood. We can do this by reading their words about it, such as those contained in the Federalist Papers. Such understanding is essential if we are to preserve what God has given us.

Blessings | Need | Self-sufficiency | Wisdom |

Ezra Taft Benson

With independence won, another body of men assembled; and under the inspiration of heaven, they too drafted a document, probably the greatest instrument ever struck off at a given time by the mind of man: the Constitution of the United States.

Enough | Family | Heart | Love | Mission | People |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

Image—that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

Error | System |

Feisal Abdul Rauf

Islamic law is clearly against terrorism, against any kind of deliberate killing of civilians or similar 'collateral damage.'

Battle | People |

Felix Adler

There is a great and crying evil in modern society. It is want of purpose. It is that narrowness of vision which shuts out the wider vistas of the soul. It is the absence of those sublime emotions which, wherever they arise, do not fall to exalt and consecrate existence.

Difficulty | Heart | Influence | Meaning | Men | Right | Understand |

Felix Adler

To-day, in the estimation of many, science and art are taking the place of religion. But science and art alike are inadequate to build up character and to furnish binding rules of conduct. We need also a clearer understanding of applied ethics, a better insight into the specific duties of life, a finer and a surer moral tact.

Children | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Meaning | Order | Rank | Sense | Words | Teacher | Understand |

Felix Adler

To understand the meaning of a great religious teacher we must find in our own life experiences somewhat akin to his. To selfish, unprincipled persons whose heart is wholly set on worldly ends, what meaning, for instance, can such utterances have as these? "You must become like little children if you would possess the kingdom of heaven;" "You must be willing to lose your life in order to save it;" "If you would be first you must consent to be last." To the worldly-minded such words convey no sense whatever; they are, in fact, rank absurdity.

Authority | Faith | Heart | Longing | Nature | Need | Religion |

Gustave Flaubert

Julian's father and mother lived in a castle with a forest round it, on the slope of a hill.

Gustave Flaubert

Oh! You think that because I pass my life trying to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have not my little judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them.

Life | Life | Will | Wrong |

Gustave Flaubert

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

Gustave Flaubert

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

Heart |

Gustave Flaubert

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

Association | Training | Association |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

Heart |

Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.

Future |

Gustave Flaubert

Why, it was the romances she had read in her youth! It was Walter Scott back again! She seemed to catch, through the mist, the sound of the Scottish bagpipes skirling among the heather. And the memory of the book helping her to understand the libretto, she followed each successive stage in the plot, while all the time a host of vague, indefinable thoughts came thronging in upon her, only to take flight at every 'crescendo' of the music.

Heart |

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Never deprive someone of hope it may be all they have.

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don?t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.

Heart | Will |