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

Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

The lack of awareness of sense and purpose has led culture to become increasingly shallow.

Awareness | Character | Culture | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Wisdom | Awareness |

Chayim Efrayim Zaichyk

If you have a positive attitude towards the events of your life, even though to an outside observer your life might seem full of suffering, you nevertheless will live a happy life. What to others might seem misfortunes, you will view as opportunities for spiritual growth.

Character | Events | Growth | Happy | Life | Life | Suffering | Will |

Yosef Avraham Wolf

Any time we become discouraged from unfortunate events in our lives, we are reacting prematurely. Our lowest moments can lead to our greatest fortune.

Character | Events | Fortune | Time |

Henry Christopher "H.C." Bailey

The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

Civilization | Determination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |

Irving Babbitt

Unless there is a recovery of the true dualism or, what amounts to the same thing, a reaffirmation of the truths of the inner life in some form - traditional or critical, religious or humanistic - civilization in any sense that has been attached to that term hitherto is threatened at its base.

Civilization | Life | Life | Sense | Wisdom | Truths |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it.

Civilization | Education | Humanity | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Society | Wisdom | Society |

Clive Barnes, fully Clive Alexander Barnes

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

Culture | People | Television | Wisdom |

Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place.

Eternal | Eternity | Events | Future | God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Past | Present | Reason | Time | Wisdom | God |

Jean de La Bruyère

There are but three events which concern men: birth, life and death. They are unconscious of their birth, they suffer when they die, and they neglect to live.

Birth | Death | Events | Life | Life | Men | Neglect | Wisdom |

Christian Nestell Bovee

Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.

Culture | Extreme | Simplicity | Wisdom |

John Christian Bovee

The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Action | Age | Events | Nature | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Andrew Carnegie

Upon the sacredness of property civilization depends - the right of the laborer. There is very little success where there is little laughter.

Civilization | Laughter | Little | Property | Right | Success | Wisdom |

Midge Decter, fully Midge Rosenthal Decter

The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the... ecological chain of birthing, growing and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.

Children | Culture | Judgment | Society | Terror | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Youth |

Albert Cooper, fully Albert Glen Cooper

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast.

Accident | Events | History | Reason | Wisdom |

John Dewey

This which marks the difference between bestiality and humanity, between culture and merely physical nature, is because man remembers, preserving and recording his experiences.

Culture | Humanity | Man | Nature | Wisdom |