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

Charles Swindoll

I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude. Attitude keeps me going or cripples my progress...It alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope. When my attitude is right, there’s no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great for me.

Challenge | Choice | Day | Decision | Extreme | Hope | Progress | Right |

Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad

Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source.

Peace | Silence | Soul |

Donald Trump

You have to remain cool under fire and let criticism roll off you. Good leaders handle conflict easily and bad ones are eaten up by it.

Criticism | Good |

Alexander Hamilton

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

Absurd | Politics | Religion |

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

How great a fire is kindled by one man’s plight!

Man |

Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum

Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.

Knowledge | Man | Mind |

Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL

No weapons hurt the soul; no fire burns it; no waters moisten it; no wind dries it up. It is imperishable, perpetual, immovable, eternal. Therefore, knowing it thus, you should not grieve.

Eternal | Knowing | Soul | Weapons |

Charles Caleb Colton

In most quarrels there is fault on both sides. A quarrel may be compared to a spark, which cannot be produced without a flint as well as steel. Either of them may hammer on wood forever; no fire will follow.

Fault | Will | Fault |

Blanche DeVries Bernard

The teacher must step back and review each day as a student, always feeling that there is more and more to learn, love appreciate. -- Be in this world, but not of it... Everything comes back on the Universal clock of time... everything. Memorize the aphorism that irrelevancy of circumstance is the highest wisdom of life... Your 'balance' is your ammunition; one should not fire it, but rather maintain it.

Aphorism | Balance | Day | Life | Life | Love | Time | Wisdom | World | Circumstance | Teacher |

Edmund Burke

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities, and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet.

Body | Diet | Excess | Gluttony | Health |

Edmund Burke

A vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat.

Mind |

English Proverbs

The passions are like fire and water, good servants but bad masters.

Good |

François Rabelais

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit.

Child |

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature, were man as unerring in his judgments as nature.

Cause | Earth | Forbearance | Inevitable | Man | Mercy | Nature | Punishment | Race |

Hosea Ballou

Envy may justly be called “the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity;” it is the most acid fruit that grows on the stock of sin, an fluid so subtle that nothing but the fire of divine love can purge it from the soul.

Bitterness | Envy | Gall | Love | Nothing | Sin | Soul |

James Martineau

The first party of painted savages who raised a few huts upon the Thames did not dream of the London they were creating, or know that in the lighting the fire on their hearth they were kindling one of the great foci of Time... All the grand agencies which the progress of mankind evolves are formed in the same unconscious way. They are the aggregate results of countless single wills, each of which, thinking merely of its own end, and perhaps fully gaining it, is at the same time enlisted by Providence in the secret service of the world.

Mankind | Progress | Providence | Service | Thinking | Time | Wills | World |

James Montgomery

Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire uttered and expressed, the motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breast. Prayer is the burden of a sigh, the falling of a tear, the upward glancing of an eye, when none but God are near. Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try, prayer, the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on high.

Desire | God | Prayer | Soul | Speech | God |