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

Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

Better | Change | Wisdom |

Franz Boas, fully Franz Uri Boas

The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.

Ancestry | Behavior | Character | Individual | Wisdom |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

We look at change but we do not see it. We speak of change, but we do not think about it. We say that change exists, that everything changes, that change is the very law of things: yes, we say it and we repeat it; but those are only words, and we reason and philosophize as though change did not exist.

Change | Law | Reason | Wisdom | Words | Think |

R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth

We are to live with life and die with death, not separated from them. The problem of suffering is insoluble, because we think of ourselves as apart from pain and death, in opposition to them. We can be free from change only by changing with it.

Change | Death | Life | Life | Opposition | Pain | Suffering | Wisdom | Think |

Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England

The confirmed prejudices of the thoughtful life, are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as most must trifle away age, because they trifled away youth, others must labor on the maze of error, because they have wandered there too long to find their way.

Age | Change | Error | Labor | Life | Life | Wisdom | Youth |

Mark Caine

The success always has a number of projects planned, to which he looks forward. Any one of them could change the course of his life overnight.

Change | Life | Life | Looks | Success | Wisdom |

James Burke

The key to why things change is the key to everything.

Change | Wisdom |

Robert Conkin, aka Bob Conkin

Resistance is thought transformed into feeling. Change the thought that creates the resistance, and there is no more resistance.

Change | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

John Dewey

Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.

Change | Intelligence | Wisdom |

India Edwards

The time has come when we must hope our children and their children ad infinitum will want from life more than material success. They must have enough of that to ensure a roof, clothing, food and some recreation, but, if we are to survive for another two hundred years, we must change our way of life.

Change | Children | Enough | Hope | Life | Life | Recreation | Success | Time | Will | Wisdom |

David Elkind

Today's child has become the unwilling, unintended victim of overwhelming stress --the stress bound of rapid, bewildering social change and constantly rising expectations.

Change | Wisdom | Child | Victim |

Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen

Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums who can't and those in cemeteries.

Change | Life | Life | People | Wisdom |

Henry Fielding

Great joy, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.

Change | Circumstances | Heart | Joy | Wisdom |

Albert Flanders, Albert I, born Albert Leopold Clément Marie Meinrad

Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity.

Change | Duty | Opportunity | Wisdom |

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

Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.

Change | Wisdom |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it: psychosis denies it and tries to substitute something else for it. A reaction which combines features of both these is the one we call normal or "healthy"; it denies reality as little as neurosis, but then, like psychosis, is concerned with effecting a change in it.

Change | Existence | Little | Reality | Wisdom |