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

Nicholas Murray Butler

There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do.

Action | Appreciation | Beauty | Character | Correctness | Education | Efficiency | Evidence | Habit | Manners | Mother | Power | Precision | Reflection | Sound | Thought | Wisdom | Worth | Precision | Appreciation | Beauty | Thought |

Samuel Butler

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

Death | History | Opinion | Public | Weakness | Wisdom | World |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

I am of opinion that there are no proverbial sayings which are not true, because they are all sentences drawn from experience itself, who is the mother of all sciences.

Experience | Mother | Opinion | Wisdom |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Cause | Example | Mother | Truth | Wisdom | Witness | Instruction |

Paul Copperman

Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents.

Attainment | Education | History | Parents | Time | Will | Wisdom |

Jean Cocteau

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

Fable | History | Reality | Truth | Wisdom |

Clarence Shepard Day, Jr.

As time goes on, new and remoter aspects of truth are discovered, which can seldom or never be fitted into creeds that are changeless.

Time | Truth | Wisdom |

Donald Davidson

Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course.)

History | Wisdom | World |

Albert Cooper, fully Albert Glen Cooper

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast.

Accident | Events | History | Reason | Wisdom |

George Croly

All history is but a romance unless it is studied as an example.

Example | History | Romance | Wisdom |

John Dewey

"Faith is tendency toward action." According to such a view, faith is the matrix of formulated creeds and the inspiration of endeavor... Faith in its newer sense signifies that experience itself is the sole ultimate authority.

Action | Authority | Experience | Faith | Inspiration | Sense | Wisdom |

Friedrich Engels

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

Anarchy | Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | History | Individual | Man | Means | Necessity | Organization | Plan | Society | Struggle | Time | Will | Wisdom |

John Florio

Night is the mother of thoughts.

Mother | Wisdom |

E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Confidence | History | Office | Self | Self-confidence | Wisdom | Afraid |

William Farquhar

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Invention | Mother | Necessity | Wisdom |

Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher

One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Excitement | History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Wisdom | Following | Respect |

Lawrence K. Frank

We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present.

Events | History | Mankind | Present | Will | Wisdom |