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

Ernest Callenbach

Certainly Ecotopians regard trees as being alive in almost a human sense Â… And equally certainly, lumber in Ecotopia is cheap and plentiful Â… Wood therefore takes the place that aluminum, bituminous facings, and many other modern materials occupy with us.

Feelings | Order | People |

Ernest Becker

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

"When an alluring woman comes in at the door," warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, "discretion may be found up the chimney". It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: "The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly."

Bitterness | Friends |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All the passengers were crowded over on the landside of the ship, watching through the narrow windows the careened hulk of a freighter, visibly damaged by shellfire, which had driven ashore to beach her cargo. She lay aground, looking against the sand in that clear water like a whale with smokestacks that had come to the beach to die.

Failure | Hope | Luck | Will | Writing | Luck | Failure |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If you have to go away,' she said, 'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? ...

Enough | Money | Plan | Plenty |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Criticism | Lord | Money | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.

Good | Happy | Love | Man | People | Wife |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.

Man | Panic | Pity | Will | Wise | Wonder | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Abstract | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The age demanded that we dance, and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.

Difficulty | Good | People |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Courage | Good | Kill | People | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

Good | Kill | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

Time | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

Better | Control | Money |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Children | Enough | Good | Men | People | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

Heart |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Behavior | People | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

Better | Courage | Good | Kill | Light | Loneliness | Love | Man | People | Time | Will | Wishes | World | Afraid |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

Ability | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Money | Nothing | Price | Reward | Thought | Work | World | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Books | Boys | Government | Hope | Man | Politics | Will | Government |