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

Charles W. Garman

Whatever may be true of men’s creed, nothing is clearer than the fact that the personality and the sovereignty of God are not a large factor in the practical life and thought of our age.

Age | Character | Creed | God | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Personality | Thought | God | Thought |

Arland Gilbert

What a man accomplishes in a day depends upon the way in which he approaches his tasks. When we accept tough jobs as a challenge to our ability and wade into them with joy and enthusiasm miracles can happen. When we do our work with a dynamic conquering spirit we get things done.

Ability | Challenge | Character | Day | Dynamic | Enthusiasm | Joy | Man | Miracles | Spirit | Work |

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

[Suicide note] - Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Character | Death | Grief | Heart | Life | Life | Misfortune | Pain | Power | Rights | Service | Suicide | Usefulness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Character | Death | Eternity | Good | Man | Time |

Lowell Fillmore

The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he."

Body | Character | Man | Power | Thinking | Thought |

Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

Character | Life | Life | Melancholy |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it.

Character | Man | Talent | Happiness |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

Character | Life | Life | Light | Power |

Chief Dan George

My friends, how desperately do we need to be loved and to love. When Christ said that man does not live by bread alone, he spoke of a hunger. This hunger was no the hunger of the body. It was not the hunger for bread. He spoke of a hunger that begins deep down in the very depths of our being. He spoke of a need as vital as breath. He spoke of our hunger for love. Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy ourselves. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.

Body | Character | Courage | Destroy | Esteem | Hunger | Little | Love | Man | Need | Sacrifice | Self | Self-esteem | Spirit | World |

Marija Gimbutas

The meaning of life is discovered through creativity and the knowledge that we are interconnected with the entire natural world. When we deny this, meaning is shattered.

Character | Creativity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Meaning | World |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If a man thinks about his physical or moral state, he usually discovers that he is ill.

Character | Man |

Owen Feltham

There is no man but for his own interest hath an obligation to be honest. There may; be sometimes temptations to be otherwise; but, all cares cast up, he shall find it the greatest ease, the highest profit, the best pleasure, the most safety, and the noblest fame, to hold the horns of this altar, which in all assays, can in himself protect him.

Character | Fame | Man | Obligation | Pleasure |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

What can be the aim of withholding from children, or let us say from young people, this information about the sexual life of human beings? Is it a fear of arousing interest in such matters prematurely, before it spontaneously stirs in them? Is it a hope of retarding by concealment of this kind the development of the sexual instinct in general, until such time as it can find its way into the only channels open to it in the civilized social order? Is it supposed that children would show no interest or understanding for the facts and riddles of sexual life if they were not prompted to do so by outside influence? Is it regarded as possible that the knowledge withheld from them will not reach them in other ways? Or is it genuinely and seriously intended that later on they should consider everything connected with sex as something despicable and abhorrent from which their parents and teachers wish to keep them apart as long as possible? I am really at a loss so say which of these can be the motive for the customary concealment from children of everything connected with sex. I only know that these arguments are one and all equally foolish, and that I find it difficult to pay them the compliment of serious refutation.

Character | Children | Concealment | Fear | Hope | Influence | Instinct | Knowledge | Life | Life | Order | Parents | People | Time | Understanding | Will | Loss |

Bishop of Geneva NULL

Charity that is both the means and the end, the only way by which we can reach that perfection which is, after all, but Charity itself... Just as the soul is the life of the body, so charity is the life of the soul.

Body | Character | Charity | Life | Life | Means | Perfection | Soul |

Owen Feltham

He that always waits upon God is ready whenever He calls. Neglect not to set your accounts even; he is a happy man who so lives as that death at all times may find him at leisure to die.

Character | Death | God | Happy | Leisure | Man | Neglect | God |

Henry Fielding

A tender-hearted and compassionate disposition, which inclines men to pity and feel the misfortunes of others, and which is, even for its own sake, incapable of involving any man in ruin and misery, is of all tempers of mind the most amiable; and though it seldom receives much honor, is worthy of the highest.

Character | Honor | Man | Men | Mind | Pity |

Henry Fielding

Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.

Character | Custom | Man |

Joe Flying Bye

In this modern time you have to do your best yourself. That’s your answer to “What is life?” You must do it yourself. Your doing, your thinking. The answers to the meaning of life are inside you.

Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Thinking | Time |