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

George Horne

Patience is the guardian of faith, the preserver of peace, the cherisher of love, the teacher of humility; patience, governs the flesh, strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues the hand, tramples upon temptation, endures persecutions, consummates martyrdom; patience produces unity in the church, loyalty in the state, harmony in families and societies; she comforts the poor and moderates the rich; she makes us humble in prosperity, cheerful in adversity, unmoved by calumny and reproach; she teaches us to forgive those who have injured us, and to be the first in asking forgiveness of those whom we have injured; she delights the faithful, and invites the unbelieving; she adorns the woman, and approves the man; is loved in a child, praised in a young man, admired in an old man; she is beautiful in either sex and every age.

Adversity | Age | Anger | Calumny | Character | Church | Envy | Faith | Forgiveness | Harmony | Humility | Love | Loyalty | Loyalty | Man | Patience | Peace | Prosperity | Spirit | Temper | Temptation | Unity | Woman | Forgiveness | Forgive | Old | Teacher |

Eda J. LeShan

We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top.

Character | Children | Danger | Doctrine | Education | Failure | Fear | Majority | Religion | World | Danger | Failure |

Henry Ford

The question, "Who ought to be boss?" is like asking "who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?" Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.

Man | Question | Wisdom |

Benjamin Franklin

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have is a second edition to correct some faults of the first.

Beginning | Choice | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Edward Hodnett

If you do not ask the right questions, you do not get the right answers. A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer. Asking questions is the A-B-C of diagnosis. Only the inquiring mind solves problems.

Mind | Problems | Question | Right | Wisdom |

Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers

There is either no freedom at all, or it is in the very asking about it.

Freedom | Wisdom |

Andrew H Malcolm

Farmers now are members of a capital-intensive industry that values good bookwork more than backwork. so several times a year almost every farmer must seek operating credit from the college fellow in the white shirt and tie - in effect, asking financial permission to work hard on his own land.

Credit | Good | Industry | Land | Wisdom | Work |

Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.

Learning | Listening | Time | Wisdom |

George Burns, born Nathan Birnbaum

If you were to go around asking people what would make them happier, you’d get answers like “a new car,” a bigger house,” “a raise in pay,” or “winning the lottery.” Probably not one in a hundred would say “a chance to help people,” and yet that is what brings about the most happiness of all.

Chance | People | Happiness |

Evan Esar

Adolescence begins when children stop asking questions – because they know all the answers.

Adolescence | Children |

Gail E Haley

Children who are not spoken to by… responsive adults will not learn to speak properly. Children who are not answered will stop asking questions. They will become incurious. And children who are not told stories and who are not read to will have few reasons for wanting to learn to read.

Children | Will | Learn |

Patrick Grim

Paradoxically, then, the best life to live will be one that is constantly struggling to become a different sort of life, a life with more virtue and less enjoyment, with more to admire and less to envy. If that best of lives were to succeed in becoming what it strives to change itself into, however, it would not longer be the best of lives. It would then be a life purely of self-sacrifice, an unenviable life suitable only for admiration. So what life should we seek, then? If what we are asking is either what kind of life to seek in order to gain a purely enviable life, or what kind of life to seek in order to achieve a purely admirable life, for those questions, the answer is fairly easy. Only a life with both elements resonates with a full portion of good. And that life, I think we have to recognize, will also be a life in which the two types of good remain in tension; a life in which the enviable and the admirable are never quite reconciled.

Admiration | Change | Enjoyment | Envy | Good | Life | Life | Order | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Think |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder, or fear. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder, or fear. Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s answer is elicited.

Awe | Beginning | Consciousness | Eternal | Faith | Fear | Isolation | Man | Mystery | Question | Religion | Sense | Soul | Wonder |

Derrick Jensen

We can flow along with the mainstream of a culture that does not serve us well – does not really make us comfortable, does not really make us safe; but only offers illusions of happiness, comfort, safety – or we can begin the oftentimes prickly work of searching our own hearts, of asking who and what we love, who and what we feel strongly enough about to change our lives for, to fight for, to live for.

Change | Comfort | Culture | Enough | Love | Safe | Work |

Frank Charles Laubach

Prayer is likely to be undervalued by all but wise people because it is silent and so secret. We are often deceived into thinking that noise is more important than silence. War sounds far more important than the noisesless growing of a crop of what, yet the silent wheat feeds millions, while war destroys them. Nobody but God knows how often prayers have changed the course of history... The highest communion is not asking God for things for ourselves, but letting Him flow down through us, out over the world - in endless benediction.

God | History | Important | Noise | People | Prayer | Silence | Thinking | War | Wise | World | God |

Hu Shih, born Hu Hung-hsing

Whenever you do something without asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” That is the meaningless life… The “why” of life makes it meaningful… Only when an answer is given is one living life as a man.

Life | Life | Man |