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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Man | Size | Time | Afraid | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

But walking down the stairs feeling each stair carefully and holding to the banister he thought, I must get her away and get her away as soon as I can without hurting her. Because I am not doing too well at this. That I can promise you. But what else can you do? Nothing, he thought. There's nothing you can do. But maybe, as you go along, you will get good at it.

People | Thought | Think | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.

Public | Right | War |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe, the older waiter said. With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night. I want to go home and into bed. We are of two different kinds, the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.

Love | Thought | Think | Thought |

Ernest Becker

I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.

Character | Choice | Justification | Order | People | Prison | Reason | Self-esteem | Spirit | Terror | Truth | World | Child |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do.

Enough | Invention | Reason |

Ernest Becker

After all, Kierkegaard was hardly a disinterested scientist. He gave his psychological description because he had a glimpse of freedom for man. He was a theorist of the open personality, of human possibility. In this pursuit, present-day psychiatry lags far behind him. Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what "health" is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment—anything but that, as he has taken such excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a "normal cultural man" is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick—whether one knows it or not: "there is such a thing as fictitious health."38 Nietzsche later put the same thought: "Are there perhaps —a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of health?" But Kierkegaard not only posed the question, he also answered it. If health is not "cultural normality," then it must refer to something else, must point beyond man's usual situation, his habitual ideas. Mental health, in a word, is not typical, but ideal-typical. It is something far beyond man, something to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.

Isolation | Openness | Personality | Rank | Work |

Ernest Becker

The real world is simply too terrible to admit.

Cause | Ideas | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Order | Question | Rest | Will |

Ernest Becker

We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.

Belief | Children | Meaning | Power | Reason | Wonder | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

However you make your living is where your talent lies.

Adultery | Sin |

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.

Murder | Reason | Regard | Murder |

Ernest Becker

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Competence | Good | Reputation | Science | Thought | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He thought of the Riviera, as it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely stretches of blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pine woods and the mountains of the Esterel going out into the sea. He remembered it as it was when he and Zelda had first found it before people went there for the summer.

Life | Life | Thought | Time | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.

Hell | Means | Men | War | Will | Learn | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek. I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

Absolute | Reason |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

Change | Day | Good | Ideas | Oppression | Time | Work |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Better | Thought | Wonder | Thought | Understand |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Discipline | Honesty | Man | Necessity | Thought | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.

Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.

People | Thought | Thought |