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

Eustace Budgell

It is extremely natural for us to desire to see such our thoughts put into the dress of words, without which indeed we can scarce have a clear and distinct idea of them our selves.

Care | Hazard | Innocence | Little | Man | Manners | Nothing | Public | Virtue | Virtue | Think | Value |

Evelyn Underhill

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.

Humor | Virtue | Virtue |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there.

Virtue | Virtue |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.

Despair | Need |

Felix Adler

The moral improvement of the nations and their individual components has not kept pace with the march of intellect and the advance of industry. Before the assaults of criticism many ancient strongholds of faith have given way, and doubt is fast spreading even into circles where its expression is forbidden. Morality, long accustomed to the watchful tutelage of faith, finds this connection loosened or severed, while no new protector has arisen to champion her rights, no new instruments been created to enforce her lessons among the people. As a consequence we behold a general laxness in regard to obligations the most sacred and dear. An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment.

Nothing | Trifles | Virtue | Virtue |

Felix Adler

It is the prerogative of man that he need not blindly follow the law of his natural being, but is himself the author of a higher moral law, and creates it even in acting it out.

Confidence | Giving | Good | Influence | Nature | Nobility | Wisdom | Wise |

Ezra Taft Benson

Prayer in the hour of need is a great boon. From simple trials to our Gethsemanes, prayer can put us in touch with God, our greatest source of comfort and counsel.

Belief | Dignity | Eternal | Fear | Free speech | God | Government | Life | Life | Right | Rights | Speech | Work | World | Worship | Government | Trial | God |

Gustave Flaubert

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

Virtue | Virtue |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.

Haile Selassie

Any who may wish to profit himself alone from the knowledge given him, rather than serve others through the knowledge he has gained from learning, is betraying knowledge and rendering it worthless.

Good |

Hannah Arendt

The demand for universal happiness and unhappiness widespread in our society are the most convincing signs that we live in a society dominated by work, but that does not have enough work to be satisfied.

Italian Proverbs

One devil drives out another.

Better | Organization | Virtue | Virtue |

Italian Proverbs

When a wife sins the husband is never innocent.

Education | Ideas | Justify | Knowledge | Learning | Literature | Need | People | Question | Study | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Value |

Italian Proverbs

Very seldom does any good thing arise but there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it.

Birth | Childhood | Death | Irony | Paradox | Religion | Time | Work |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

Birth | Hope | World |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to.

Problems | Virtue | Virtue |