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

Jane Porter

Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian of what it commands: and is the only sure defence of happiness.

Good | Law | Life | Life | Reputation | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees.

Destiny | Law | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Wisdom | Thought |

John Powell, fully Sir John Powell

Consider the reason of the case, for nothing is law that is not reason.

Law | Nothing | Reason | Wisdom |

J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics.

Dreams | Law | Man | Mind | Order | Religion | Universe | Wisdom | World |

Roscoe Pound, fully Nathan Roscoe Pound

The law must be stable, but it must not stand still.

Law | Wisdom |

Jean Racine, baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine

Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.

Crime | Extreme | Innocence | Law | Rights | Sacred | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

What is a miracle? The natural law of a unique event.

Law | Unique | Wisdom |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life.

Art | Chance | Civilization | Contradiction | Feelings | Harmony | Imagination | Law | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Necessity | Play | Reality | Reason | Thought | Unity | Wisdom | Art | Thought |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Law being purely the declaration of the general will, it is clear that, in the exercise of the legislative power, the people cannot be represented; but in that of the executive power, which is only the force that is applied to giver the law effect, it both can and should be represented.

Force | Law | People | Power | Will | Wisdom |

Richard Rovere

Politicians cannot afford to deal in finalities and ultimate truths; they abide, by and large, by probabilities and reasonable assumptions and the law of averages.

Law | Wisdom |

Ignazio Silone , original name Secondo Transqulli

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men.

Equality | Law | Men | Practice | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

No more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause.

Cause | Law | Nature | Reason | Wisdom |

John Selden

Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because it is an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell me how to confute him.

Ignorance | Law | Man | Men | Will | Wisdom |

Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

Old age is not one of the beauties of creation, but it is one of its harmonies. The law of contrasts is one of the laws of beauty. Under the conditions of our climate, shadow gives light its worth; sternness enhances mildness; solemnity, splendor. Varying proportions of size support and subserve one another.

Age | Beauty | Law | Light | Old age | Size | Wisdom | Worth |

Jeremy Taylor

The devil does not tempt people whom he finds suitably employed.

Devil | People | Wisdom |

Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

There are times when it would seem as if God fished with a line, and the devil with a net.

Devil | God | Wisdom | God |