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

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Mardonius was more fond of me than I was of him. That always gives one an advantage.

Literature | Virtue | Virtue | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

Books | Literature | Nothing | Writing | Learn | Teacher |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out.

Argument | Pleasure | Relationship |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

Battle | Criticism | Day | Life | Life | Literature | Nothing | Order | Present | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin cushion...Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.

Absurd | Time |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

Absurd | People |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Pleasure |

Evelyn Underhill

If , then, we desire a simple test of the quality of our spiritual life, a consideration of the tranquility, gentleness and strength with which we deal with the circumstances of our outward life will serve us better than anything that is based on the loftiness of our religious notions, or fervor of our religious feelings.

Little | Patience | Pleasure | Weakness |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.

Children | Pleasure |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm.

Better | Despondency | Pleasure | World |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

Literature |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

Absurd | Distinction | Effort | Excitement | Growth | Ideas | Inevitable | Life | Life | Men | Organic | People | Right | Think |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

A necklace of pearls on a white neck. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down... the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty.

Books | Dirty | Literature |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas' 'Did you?' 'I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't it?

Pleasure |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.

Age | Literature |

Felix Adler

It is not possible to enter into the nature of the Good by standing aloof from it — by merely speculating upon it. Act the Good, and you will believe in it. Throw yourself into the stream of the world's good tendency and you will feel the force of the current and the direction in which it is setting. The conviction that the world is moving toward great ends of progress will come surely to him who is himself engaged in the work of progress.

Better | Business | Little | Pleasure | World | Business |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

Good | Impression | Literature | Man | Quiet | Understanding | Child |

Ezra Taft Benson

I believe one of the most serious mistakes a President could make would be to weaken the Constitution. From the time I was a small boy I was taught that the American Constitution is an inspired document. I was also taught that the day will come when the Constitution will be endangered and hang as it were by a single thread. I was taught that we should study the Constitution. . . . I expect to continue my efforts to help protect and safeguard our inspired Constitution.

Applause | Fear | Heaven | Pleasure | World |