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

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Some men never feel small; but these are the men who are.

Character | Men |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

Art | Character | Common Sense | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Means | Rationality | Sense | Spirit | Art |

Christopher Society NULL

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

Better | Character | Darkness | Light |

Susan Fenimore Cooper, fully Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper

What a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe to their beauty and their utility! How pleasantly the shadows of the wood fall upon our heads when we turn from the glitter and turmoil of the world of man!

Admiration | Beauty | Character | Debt | Gratitude | Man | Turmoil | Wisdom | World | Beauty |

William Camden

Young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be so.

Character | Men | Old | Think |

Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL

You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.

Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |

Yehuda Leib Chasman

When one lives a life focused on gaining, wisdom, his entire life is full of joy and happiness.

Character | Joy | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Geoffrey Chaucer

For how might sweetness ever have been known to him who never tasted bitterness? Felicity exists for those alone who first have suffered sorrow and distress... By opposites does one in wisdom grow.

Bitterness | Character | Distress | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Chazon Ish, named Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz

Physical pleasures can give a person pleasure and happiness to some degree, but this cannot compete with the elevated pleasure that one can derive when one toils in wisdom.

Character | Pleasure | Wisdom | Happiness |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

Character | Heaven | Man | Men | Music | Play | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |

Samuel Butler

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, but the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to him - therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

Character | Man | Progress | World |

William Ellery Channing

The great duty of God’s children is to love one another. This duty on earth takes the name and form of the law of humanity. We are to recognize all men as brethren, no matter where born, or under what sky, or institution or religion they may live. Every man belongs to the race, and owes a duty to mankind... Men cannot, by combining themselves into narrower or larger societies, sever the sacred, blessed bond which joins them to their kind... The law of humanity must reign; over the assertion of all human rights.

Assertion | Character | Children | Duty | Earth | God | Humanity | Law | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Race | Religion | Rights | Sacred | Blessed |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been men of faith.

Character | Faith | Heart | History | Men | Principles | Skepticism | World |

Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith

Scandal is what one-half the world takes pleasure in inventing, and the other half in believing.

Character | Pleasure | Scandal | World |