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

Francis Quarles

Knowledge descries; wisdom applies.

Character | Knowledge | Wisdom |

Gabriel Riesser

May those who represent advanced views bear in mind that true wisdom is always joined with mildness, that malice never converts the erring but strengthens him in his attitude, and that it is very unfitting to combat error (so long as this does not assume the aspect of injustice) with the weapons of hatred.

Character | Error | Malice | Mind | Weapons | Wisdom |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.

Character | Patience | Skill | Will |

Logan Pearsall Smith

We grow with the years more fragile in body but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Body | Character | Conscience |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

Charles Simmons

Impure thoughts awaken impure feelings, lead to impure expressions, and beget impure actions, and these lead to imbecility both of body and mind, and to the ruin of all that is noble and pure in character.

Body | Character | Feelings | Mind |

Logan Pearsall Smith

The lusts and greeds of the Body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.

Body | Character | Soul |

Gordon-Michael Scallion

All life is initiation. Each experience, each act, deed, especially thoughts, are a portion of initiation. Initiation then is the process whereby the entity - the soul force, is given the opportunity to develop spiritually. This means, that when the soul chooses to improve itself - to move towards a greater light, the soul body so changes its vibration as to remove from its spiritual fabric those attachments detrimental to its path upward.

Body | Character | Experience | Force | Life | Life | Light | Means | Opportunity | Soul |

Charles Seymour

Consideration is not merely a matter of emotional goodwill but of intellectual vigor and moral self-sacrifice. Wisdom must combine with sympathy. That is why consideration underlies the phrase "a scholar and a gentleman," which really sums up the ideal of the output of a college education.

Character | Consideration | Education | Sacrifice | Scholar | Self | Self-sacrifice | Sympathy | Wisdom |

Arthur Schnitzler

I trust your wisdom only when it comes from the heart, your goodness when it comes from the mind.

Character | Heart | Mind | Trust | Wisdom |

Sydney Smith

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.

Character | Men | Oblivion | Weakness | Wisdom | Old | Truths |

Herbert Schiffer

Among the qualities of mind and heart which conduce to worldly success, there is one, the importance of which is more real, and which is generally underrated in our day... It is courtesy.

Character | Courtesy | Day | Heart | Mind | Qualities | Success |

Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

Lessons of wisdom have never such power over us as when they are wrought in to the heart through the groundwork of a story which engages the passions.

Character | Heart | Power | Story | Wisdom |

John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

No man’s body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.

Body | Character | Heaven | Man | Strength |

Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

Character | Folly | Skill | Vice |

Tantra Tattva

In the root divine Wisdom is all-Brahman; in the stem she is an all-Illusion; in the flower she is all-World; and in the fruit, all-Liberation.

Character | Illusion | Wisdom | World |

Jeremy Taylor

It is a great point of wisdom to hide ignorance, as to discover knowledge. To be proud of learning is the greatest ignorance.

Character | Ignorance | Knowledge | Learning | Wisdom |