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

Harold S. Kahm

Chain reaction is popularly associated with the atomic bomb, but it is no less gigantic a force in your daily life. Every word you speak, every action you perform sets up a chain of reaction that can end in a damaging explosion or a shower of blessings.

Action | Atomic bomb | Blessings | Force | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Knowledge in relationship creates division... knowledge becomes a barrier in relationship... Where there is division there must be conflict. And therefore an action born out of conflict is a non-intelligent action. So intelligent action is an action that is without friction, without conflict... Dependence is an action of a mind that is not intelligent.

Action | Dependence | Knowledge | Mind | Relationship | Wisdom |

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Music moves us, and we know not why; we feel the tears but cannot trace their source. Is the language of some other state, born of its memory? For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of another world like music?

Instinct | Language | Memory | Music | Soul | Tears | Wisdom | World |

Charles Lamb

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

Accident | Action | Good | Pleasure | Wisdom |

Claude Levi-Strauss

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Character | Language | Means | Music | Wisdom |

Ammianus Marcellinus

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Language | Truth | Wisdom |

Max Müller, fully Friedrich Max Müller

Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.

Ignorance | Knowledge | Language | Philosophy | Wisdom |

Max Picard

The language of the child is silence transformed into sound: the language of the adult is sound that seeks for silence.

Language | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | Child |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

What is most difficult to render from one language to another is the tempo of its style.

Language | Style | Wisdom |

D. Z. Phillips, fully Dewi Zephaniah Phillips

Clearly a man’s commitment to God shows itself in the language he uses, not only about God, but about the world and his general behavior.

Behavior | Commitment | God | Language | Man | Wisdom | World | God |

Pamela Oliver and Gerald Maxwell

Collective action usually entails the development of a critical mass - a small segment of the population that chooses to make big contributions to the collective action... that will tend to explode, to draw in the other less interested or less resourceful members of the population and to carry the event toward its maximum potential.

Action | Will | Wisdom |

Max Picard

The world of silence without speech is the world before creation, the world of unfinished creation. In silenced truth is passive and slumbering, but in language it is wide-awake. Silence is fulfilled only when speech comes forth from silence and gives it meaning and honor.

Honor | Language | Meaning | Silence | Speech | Truth | Wisdom | World |

William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa

In strictness of language there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; wisdom always supposing action and action directed by it.

Action | Knowledge | Language | Wisdom |

Thomas W. Palmer

"Knowledge," says Bacon, "is power"; but mere knowledge is not power; it is only possibility. Action is power; and its highest manifestation is when it is directed by knowledge.

Action | Knowledge | Power | Wisdom |

Francis Quarles

Meditation is the life of the soul; action is the soul of meditation; honor is the reward of action; so meditate, that thou mayst do; so do, that thou mayst purchase honor; for which purchase, give God the glory.

Action | Glory | God | Honor | Life | Life | Meditation | Reward | Soul | Wisdom | God |