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

Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

During my first press conference as president, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that, as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.

People | Power | Progress | Search | Truth |

Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

In your light I learn how to love. / In your beauty, how to make poems. / You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, / But sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

Right | Search | Truth | Words |

Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

We should ask God to help us toward manners. Inner gifts do not find their way to creatures without just respect.

Enough | Right | Search | Silence |

Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

There is a loneliness more precious than life. There is a freedom more precious than the world. Infinitely more precious than life and the world is that moment when one is alone with God.

Search |

Russell H. Conwell, fully Russell Herman Conwell

Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them.

Earth | Ends | Journey | Search | Will | Happiness |

Rush Limbaugh

None of what Barack Obama is doing or wants to do to this country is anything the rest of the world hasn't seen before and already failed at.

Disagreement | Doctrine | Fairness | Neutrality | Search | Think |

S. Truett Cathy

Eleven Dos and Don’ts of Proven Entrepreneurial Success - 1. Don’t be burdened with personal debt. a. Car payment b. House payment c. Establish a nest egg d. Live simple 2. Start early as a teenager. Concentrate on what brings you happiness in your career. Have a tremendous want to – determination. 3. Sacrifice material things. Reward yourself later. 4. Shortcut to success: Observe what is working in the lives of others. Teenagers, observe mature individuals. 5. Don’t try to please all people. 6. Set priorities in the proper order. 7. Expand cautiously. Grow your business cautiously. 8. Franchising may or may not be good for your particular business. Use it cautiously. 9. Be prepared for disappointments. Many successful individuals experience failure. 10. Be kind to people. Courtesy is very cheap but brings great dividends. 11. Invite God to be involved in every decision. God gives us a brain to use – common sense. You can do it if you want to. God has given each of us a talent. Maybe yours is yet to be discovered. We honor God with our success. He designed us to be winners.

Experience | Search | Time | Will |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

In order that we might receive that love whereby we should love, we were ourselves loved, while as yet we had it not.

Faith | Prejudice | Progress | Scripture | Search | Truth |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery.

Death | God | Happy | Life | Life | Search | Soul | World | God |

Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

Until the Lord shall have completely purged it after the manner that He wills, no means or remedy is of any service or profit for the relief of this affliction… The soul is powerless. Spiritual things in the soul believes that, if trials come to it, that it will never escape from them. And if spiritual blessings come, the soul believes its troubles are now over.

Search | Will |

Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

It is not possible without temptations for a man to grow wise in spiritual warfare, to know his Provider and perceive his God, and to be secretly confirmed in his faith, save by virtue of the experience which he has gained.

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Saint Teresa of Ávila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL

We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness, we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.

Need | Search |

Sidney Lanier

Through the seas of dreams and the seas of fantasies, through the seas of solitudes and vacancies, and through myself, the deepest of the seas, I strive to thee, Nirvana.

Love | Search |

Simone Weil

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.

Man | Search | Waiting | Will |

Stephan Jay Gould

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement,

Aesthetic | Body | Expectation | Famous | Looks | Progress | Search | Expectation |

Stephan Jay Gould

Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with ‘roots’ of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than a barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food.

History | Question | Search | Style | Will | Writing | Victim |

Stephan Bodian

Delusion and wisdom don’t coexist very well.

Love | Practice | Search | Learn |

Stephan Jay Gould

Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.

Evolution | Knowledge | Search | Understand |

Stephen Hawking

As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change... There’s a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse. That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat.

Beginning | Better | Confidence | Discovery | Optimism | Search | Thought | Uncertainty | Will | Theoretical | Discovery | Govern | Thought |