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

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

Women should perform their duties well and give due importance to their appearances because only then they will be able to attract good husbands.

Comfort |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

We will not abandon property that we feel can acquire.

Comfort |

Tryon Edwards

Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self and benevolence to men.

Comfort | Consolation | God | Man | Sympathy | Wise | God |

Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming

A scholar should gather up spirit and energy in single-mindedness. If your quest for virtue is for reasons of fame and fortune, you will never amount to anything. If in scholarly endeavors you indulge in fashionable verse and stylistic flourishes, you cannot attain depth and stability of mind.

Better | Comfort | Good | Power | Sorrow | Instruction |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

But, fortunately for mankind, the neat rents of the land, under a system of private property, can never be diminished by the progress of cultivation.

Comfort | Duty | Object | Power | Wealth | Will |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

Comfort | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Man | Men | Peace |

Hugh Blair

Compassion is an emotion of which we ought never to be ashamed. Graceful, particularly in youth, is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe. We should not permit ease and indulgence to contract our affections, and wrap us up in a selfish enjoyment; but we should accustom ourselves to think of the distresses of human, life, of the solitary cottage; the dying parent, and the weeping orphan. Nor ought we ever to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty. Hugh Blair

Comfort | Temper |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.

Authority | Comfort | Giving | Question | Learn | Think |

William Shakespeare

A day in April never came so sweet, to show how costly summer was at hand, as this fore-spurrer comes before his lord.

Comfort |

William Shakespeare

A maid that paragons description and wild fame; one that excels the quirks of blazoning pens, and in the essential vesture of creation does tire the ingener. Othello, Act ii, Scene 1

Comfort | Good | Need | Play | Smile | Trouble | Think |

William Shakespeare

AENEAS: 'Tis the old Nestor. HECTOR: Let me embrace thee, good old chronicle, that hast so long walked hand in hand with time.

Art | Comfort | Art |

William Shakespeare

A great cause of the night is lack of the sun. As You Like It, Act iii, Scene 2

Children | Comfort | Little | Love | Title |

William Shakespeare

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? And I another, so weary with disasters, tugged with fortune, that I would set my life on any chance to mend it or be rid on't. Macbeth, Act ii, Scene 1

Comfort |

William Shakespeare

And he that stands upon a slippery place makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up. King John. Act iii. Sc. 4.

Comfort |

William Shakespeare

DON PEDRO: To be merry best becomes you; for, out o' question, you were born in a merry hour. BEATRICE: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under than was I born. Much Ado about Nothing, Act ii, Scene 1

Comfort | Sorrow | World | Trouble | Happiness |

William James

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Comfort | Day | Energy | Individual | Learn |

William Gurnall

Godliness, as well as the doctrine of our faith, is a mystery.

Comfort | Means | Will | Worship |

William Law

Through the want of a sincere intention of pleasing God in all our actions, we fall into such irregularities of life as, by the ordinary means of grace, we should have power to avoid.

Comfort | Light | Man | Men | Nature | Order | People | Sensibility | World | Afraid |

William (Morley Punshon) McFee

The world belongs to the enthusiast who keeps cool.

Comfort | Existence |

William Matthews

Nature cuts queer capers with men’s phizzes at times, and confounds all the deductions of philosophy. Character does not put all its goods, sometimes not any of them, in its shop-window.

Comfort | Truth |