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

William Benton Clulow

Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men.

Learning | Men | Philosophy | Wisdom |

John Dewey

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish water-proof to new ideas.

Ability | Curiosity | Humility | Ideas | Ignorance | Learning | Mind | Wisdom |

William H. Cowley

People sometimes refer to higher education as the higher learning, but colleges and universities are much more than the knowledge factories; they are testaments to man's perennial struggle to make a better world for himself, his children, and his children's children. This, indeed, is their sovereign purpose. They are great fortifications against ignorance and irrationality; but they are more than places of higher learning - they are centers and symbols of man's higher yearning.

Better | Children | Education | Ignorance | Knowledge | Learning | Man | People | Purpose | Purpose | Struggle | Wisdom | World |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother.

Father | Man | Mother | Wisdom | Woman |

Albert Einstein

The environment is everything that isn't me.

Wisdom |

Henry Ford

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable, regardless of physical capacity.

Capacity | Learning | Wisdom |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

Heredity | Life | Life | Wisdom |

John Florio

Night is the mother of thoughts.

Mother | Wisdom |

Ted W. Engstrom

We must expect to fail, but fail in a learning posture, determined not to repeat the mistakes, and to maximize the benefits from what is learned in the process.

Learning | Wisdom |

William Farquhar

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Invention | Mother | Necessity | Wisdom |

François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

True prayer is only another name for the love of God. Its excellence does not consist in the multitude of our words; for our Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him. The true prayer is that of the heart, and the heart prays only for what it desires. To pray, then, is to desire - but to desire what God would have us desire.

Desire | Excellence | Father | God | Heart | Love | Need | Prayer | Wisdom | Words | Excellence | God |

Lowell Fillmore

Every individual is a king in the castle of his own mind. As king of his thoughts he can think those thought which will make him an unhappy and fearful monarch, or he can make his reign joyous and harmonious by listening to the Father within himself before making decisions.

Father | Individual | Listening | Mind | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Think | Thought |

Norman Geschwind

One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"

Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is most thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.

Language | Learning | Study | Wisdom | Teacher |

Erle Stanley Gardner

Where ignorance is bliss, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Ignorance | Learning | Little | Wisdom |

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

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

Failure | Heredity | Success | Wisdom | Failure |

Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL

Peace is the first thing the angels sang. Peace is the mark of the sons of God. Peace is the nurse of love. Peace is the mother of unity. Peace is the rest of blessed souls. Peace is the dwelling place of eternity.

Angels | Eternity | God | Love | Mother | Peace | Rest | Unity | Wisdom | Blessed |