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

Elizabeth Gilbert

If you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.

Belief | Care | Destiny | Evidence | Faith | God | Life | Life | Light | Meaning | Nature | Play | Prudence | Prudence | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

Control | Ego | Heart | Light | Little | Purpose | Purpose | Soul |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.

Attention | Change | Control | Death | Ego | God | Heart | Important | Life | Life | Light | Little | Love | Marriage | Mind | People | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Relationship | Right | Soul | Space | Time | Universe | Will | God | Afraid | Think | Understand |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Prostration would become cold and drown in boredom fashionable to let your attention Liszt for.

Life | Life | Light | Love | Relationship | Time | Think |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

As the moths around a taper, as the bees around a rose, as the gnats around a vapour, so the spirits group and close round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose.

Heart | Light | Love | Silence | Speech | Teach | Words |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

That he, in his developed manhood, stood a little sunburnt by the glare of life; while I . . it seemed no sun had shone on me.

Grief | Light |

Elizabeth Gilbert

The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in ones lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same ole addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma ( and also of western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven.

Balance | Darkness | Difficulty | Light | Madness | Present |

Elizabeth Gilbert

There’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, Let me take care of you forever, and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely . . .

God | Light | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Soon you start craving that intense attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld you probably turn sick, crazy and depleted not to mention resentful of the dealer who encourage this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore despite that you know that he has it hidden somewhere God dammit because you know that he used to give it to you for free.

Light |

Elizabeth Gilbert

So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

Light | Love | Time | Think |

Elizabeth Lesser

One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'

Age | Better | Cause | Earth | Enlightenment | Fame | Famous | Fortune | Good | Illusion | Kill | Labor | Light | Man | Mind | Money | People | Present | Problems | Shame | Terrorism | Work | Worry | Instruction | Understand |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

You believe in God, for your part?--that He who makes can make good things from ill things, best from worst, as men plant tulips upon dunghills when they wish them finest.

Conscience | God | Light | Love | Need | Nothing | Work | God |

Emil M. Cioran

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.

Beauty | Death | Grace | Illusion | Innocence | Light | Sadness | Beauty |

Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

Light | Understand |

Emil M. Cioran

Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic.

Existence | Forgiveness | Happy | Light | Soul | Will | Forgiveness |

Emile Zola

The vision that had emerged from the invisible was returning to the invisible. It was no more an appearance that was fading away, having created an illusion. All is but a dream. And, at the peak of happiness, Angélique had vanished, in the faint breath of a kiss.

Evil | Light | Time | Will | Trial |

Emile Zola

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

Dirty | Good | Light | Old |

Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

Genius | Light |

Emile Zola

This must have led to a brief moment of psychological anguish. Note that, so far, General Billot was in no way compromised. Newly appointed to his position, he had the authority to bring out the truth. He did not dare, no doubt in terror of public opinion, certainly for fear of implicating the whole General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, and General Gonse, not to mention the subordinates. So he hesitated for a brief moment of struggle between his conscience and what he believed to be the interest of the military. Once that moment passed, it was already too late. He had committed himself and he was compromised. From that point on, his responsibility only grew, he took on the crimes of others, he became as guilty as they, if not more so, for he was in a position to bring about justice and did nothing. Can you understand this: for the last year General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible knowledge to themselves?

Day | Duty | Force | Justice | Light | Nothing | Power | Truth | Will |

Emile Gaboriau

A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us.

Light | Will | Learn |