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

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.

Men |

Erin McKean

If you want someone to stop listening to you go ahead and yell. If you want them to listen to every word, whisper. -Mimi

Absurd |

Ernesto Sirolli

Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.

World |

Ernest Becker

All a child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say naturalized but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden

Freedom | Health | Man | Question |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

Good | Life | Life | Nothing | Plenty | Time | Worry |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

Happy | Lying | People | Sorrow | Happiness |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I know that the night is not the same as the day: that things are different, that is what one feels at night, during the day cannot explain it, because then it does not exist, and the lonely people, where their loneliness one to take effect, the night can be a time Horrors.

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

But man is not made for defeat, he said. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Life | Life | Need |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids.

Body | Wants |

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 Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life

Life | Life | Pleasure | Wrong | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones. You kept from thinking and it was all marvelous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it.

Care | Nothing | Pain |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.

Destroy | Evil | Pleasure |

Ernest Becker

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.

Absence | Consciousness | Death | Evil | Means | Meditation | Men | Power |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled.

Right |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There were really only two men I knew who ever got a laugh out of paying their income taxes. One was cheating the government and getting away with it. The other had a sick sense of humor and would probably have set up a concession stand at the Boston Tea Party and sold sugar cubes and lemon slices.

Marriage | Time |

Ernest Becker

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

Enough | Important | Life | Life | People | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Books | Good |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.