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

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Our current neglect of Law is yet another of the many indications that twentieth-century educators have ceased to be concerned with questions of ultimate truth or meaning and (apart from mere vocational training) are interested solely in the dissemination of a rootless and irrelevant culture, and the fostering of the solemn foolery of scholarship for scholarship’s sake.

Character | Culture | Law | Meaning | Neglect | Training | Truth |

Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange

The greatest of all injustice is that which goes under the name of law; and of all sorts of tyranny, the forcing the letter of the law against the equity is the most insupportable.

Character | Equity | Injustice | Injustice | Law | Tyranny | Wisdom |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

An eternal happiness is a security for which there is no longer any market value in the speculative nineteenth century; at the very most it may be used by the gentlemen of the clerical profession to swindle rural innocents.

Character | Eternal | Security | Happiness | Value |

Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva

Justice is immortal, eternal, and immutable, like God Himself; and the development of law is only then a progress when it is directed towards those principles which always like Him, are eternal; and whenever prejudice of error succeeds in establishing in customary law any doctrine contrary to eternal justice.

Character | Doctrine | Error | Eternal | God | Justice | Law | Prejudice | Principles | Progress | God |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison to the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

Acquaintance | Character | Difficulty | Law | Life | Life | Man | Mankind | Nature | Power | Will |

J. Russell Lynes

The greatest contribution of human value one person can make to others is by example.

Character | Example | Value |

Don Carlos Musser

Because of the law of cessation, a man is "as he thinketh in his heart." Nothing can happen without its adequate cause.

Cause | Character | Heart | Law | Man | Nothing |

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

Nothing is impossible to the man that can will. Is that necessary? That shall be. This is the only law of success.

Character | Law | Man | Nothing | Success | Will |

Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL

Things only have the value that we give them. [Things are only worth what you make them worth.]

Character | Worth | Value |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure of its exercise.

Character | Pleasure | Virtue | Virtue | Value |

Jacques Maritain

The office of the moral law is that of a pedagogue, to protect and educate us in the use of freedom. At the end of this period of instruction, we are enfranchised from every servitude, even from the servitude of law, since Love made us one in spirit with the wisdom that is the source of Law.

Character | Freedom | Law | Love | Moral law | Office | Servitude | Spirit | Wisdom |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.

Character | Despise | Enough | Evidence | Extreme | Good | Ignorance | Knowledge | Mother | Power | Stupidity | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wise | Value | Vice |