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

Drew Curtis

ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.

People | Question |

William Shakespeare

Now sits the wind fair, and we will aboard.

Question |

William Shakespeare

Now were not I a little pot and soon hot, my very lips might freeze to my teeth, my tongue to the roof of my mouth, my heart in my belly, ere I should come by a fire to thaw me.

Question |

Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

India Conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

Question |

Egyptian Proverbs

An answer if profitable in proportion to the intensity of the quest.

Question | Learn |

Elizabeth Bibesco

It is never any good dwelling on goodbyes. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

Love | Question |

Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

The wanderlust crept up again inside her like a shooting star, a sudden, violent urge to escape disappearing into darkness again. She pushed down the afterglow and focused.

Question | Will |

Albert Einstein

If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings.

Action | Consequences | Desire | Earnestness | Fulfillment | Individual | Life | Life | Mankind | Opinion | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Struggle |

Albert Einstein

In responding to this poignant cry for help, Einstein offered no easy solace, and this very fact must have heartened the student and lightened the lonely burden of his doubts. Here is Einstein's response. It was written in English and sent from Princeton on 3 December 1950, within days of receiving the letter:

Individual | Meaning | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Society | Society |

Elizabeth Gilbert

In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

God | People | Question | God |

William Shakespeare

Stay, stay thy hands! thou art an Amazon, and fightest with the sword of Deborah.

Anger | Man | Question | Reason |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.

Control | Fate | Grace | Little | Man | Need | Play | Question | Will | Fate |

Elizabeth Gilbert

When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become log-jammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.

Better | Distress | Heart | Inquiry | Question | Security | Will |

Elizabeth Gilbert

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

Better | Care | Order | Question | Solitude | Will | Woman |

Elizabeth Gilbert

We had more fun waiting in line together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their honeymoons. We gave each other same nickname, so there would be no separation between us. We made goals, vows, promises and dinner together. He read books to me...

Day | Need | Question |

Elizabeth Gilbert

What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God

God | Question | God |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

This is the testimony of all the good books, sermons, hymns, and memoirs I read--that God's ways are infinitely perfect; that we are to love Him for what He is and therefore equally as much when He afflicts as when He prospers us; that there is no real happiness but in doing and suffering His will; and that this life is but a scene of probation through which we pass to the real life above.

Question |

Dorothy Parker

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Question | Time |

Emil M. Cioran

What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

Question | Time | Think |

Emma Goldman

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.

Mind | Past | Question | Right | Time |