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

Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.

Contention | History | Power | Public | Wisdom |

Donn Piatt

A man selects his enemies, his friends make themselves, and from these friends he is apt to suffer.

Man | Wisdom | Friends |

William Penn

Death is but crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas.

Death | Wisdom | World | Friends |

Richard Reeves

A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents.

Children | Dirty | History | Politics | Wisdom |

Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart

[The earth] is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love.

Art | Birth | Death | Earth | History | Little | Love | Means | Music | Poetry | Universe | Wisdom | Art |

Irwin Sarason

Good friends are good for your health.

Good | Health | Wisdom | Friends |

Franz Rosenzweig

A people's entry into universal history is marked by the moment at which it makes the bible its own in a translation.

Bible | History | People | Wisdom | Bible |

Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

To be confined by the feet with friends is better than to walk in a garden with strangers.

Better | Wisdom | Friends |

Albert Schweitzer

One truth stands firm. All that happens in the world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

History | Truth | Wisdom | World |

Charles P. Steinmetz, fully Charles Proteus Steinmetz, born Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz

Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men... Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched.

Day | Force | History | Little | Men | People | Power | Study | Will | Wisdom | World | Learn |

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Education | History | Race | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

If all Earth history is compressed into one “day”, the sea is mixed two thousand times in every “minute” of it, distributing warmth and energy evenly round our water-cooled and air-conditioned planet. Every eighteen “seconds” on this collapsed time scale, the world’s rivers dump enough dissolved salts into the sea to double its concentration, but this nevertheless remains around a resolute and reasonable 3 per cent. It is vital that this should be so, because few living cells can survive a salinity which exceeds, even for just a few seconds, a value of 6 per cent. Half the living matter in the world is still found in the sea, and that fact alone seems to make the chemical regulation not only necessary, but possible.

Day | Earth | Energy | Enough | History | Regulation | Time | Wisdom | World | Value |

Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

The history of thought can be summarized in these words: It is absurd by what it seeks, great by what it finds.

Absurd | History | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

James Paul Warburg

Throughout history there has never been an evitable war. The greatest danger of war always lies in the widespread acceptance of its inevitability.

Acceptance | Danger | History | War | Wisdom | Danger |

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.

History | Ideas | Wisdom |