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

Italian Proverbs

The best way to conquer or control a group of people is by encouraging them to fight among themselves rather than allowing them to unite in opposition to the ruling authority.

Life | Life |

Italian Proverbs

The buckets take to fighting with the well, and get their heads broken.

Life | Life | Little | Practice | Precept | Sense | Govern |

Italian Proverbs

That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

Dawn | Evolution | History | Individual | Life | Life | Sense | Survival | Truth |

Italian Proverbs

The liar is not believed when he speaks the truth.

Man |

Italian Proverbs

Two women and a goose make a market.

Doubt | Irony | Life | Life | Means | Need | Plenty | Self | Superiority | Understanding | Work | World | Afraid |

Italian Proverbs

War makes robbers, and peace hangs them.

Authenticity | Good | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Mystery | Thought | Worth | Thought |

Italian Proverbs

When all men say you are an ass it is time to bray.

Failure | Future | Life | Life | Mistake | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Right | Failure |

Italian Proverbs

The world wags on with three things: doing, undoing, and pretending.

Ability | Adventure | Character | Comfort | Convictions | Daring | Ideas | Injustice | Injustice | Love | Man | Men | Qualities | Sound | Suffering | Talking | Time | Universe | Will | Witness | Blessed | Old | Winning |

Italian Proverbs

When a man has fallen into the mire, the more he flounders the more he fouls himself.

Dishonesty | Life | Life | Little | People | Reason | Self | Sense | Truth | Words | Think |

Italian Proverbs

Water, smoke, and a vicious woman, drive men out of the house.

Life | Life |

Italian Proverbs

The poor is hated by his neighbor, but the rich hath many friends.

Better | Life | Life | Understand |

Italian Proverbs

What costs little is little esteemed.

Enough | Humanity | Progress | Science | Will | Think |

Italian Proverbs

When wine sinks, words swim.

Atheism | Better | Commitment | God | Life | Life | Reason | Right | Story | Suffering | Truth | Unique | God |

Italian Proverbs

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

Children | Day | Depression | Despair | Effort | Knowledge | Life | Life | Parents | Suicide | World | Wrong | Child |

Italian Proverbs

Weddings and spiritual matters are heaven sent.

Life | Life | Thought | Thought |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

In the development and the maintenance of a living organism the coordination is very clear. The development of each part can be shown to be dependent on that of other parts, including the immediate environment; and the more closely development and maintenance are studied the more evident does this become. But the particular manner in which the parts and the environment influence one another is such that the specific structure and activities of the organism are maintained. They are unmistakably developed and maintained as a whole, and this is what we mean when we say that the organism lives a specific life. The conception of its life enables us to predict the general behavior of its parts so long as it is alive, and in particular it enables us to predict the general manner of its reproduction from a rudimentary part of the same organism? it is this co-ordinated maintenance that we call life.

Life | Life | Man |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.

Abuse | Experience | Life | Life | Little | Means | Men | Problems | Suicide | Trust | Work | World | Learn |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.

Man |