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

Thomas Boston

Temptation is the fire that brings up the scum of the heart.

Character | Heart | Temptation |

Pierre Cornielle

The fire which seems extinguished often slumbers beneath the ashes.

Character | Wisdom |

Jeremy Collier

Conscience and covetousness are never to be reconciled; like fire and water they always destroy each other, according tot he predominancy of the element.

Character | Conscience | Destroy |

Taisen Deshimaru

You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.

Character | Day |

Madame Émile de Girardin, Delphine de Girardin, née Gay

To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you, in a word to be the idol of one’s idol - is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven, and deserves death.

Character | Death | Heaven | Joy | Love |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum; but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question how much fire you have in your belly.

Business | Character | Life | Life | Question | Romance | Will |

Maria Jane Jewsbury

Love is the purification of the heart from self; it strengthens and ennobles the character; gives higher motive and nobler aim to every action of life, and makes both man and woman strong, noble, and courageous. The power to love truly and devotedly is the nobles gift with which a human being can be endowed; but it is a sacred fire that must not be burned to idols.

Action | Character | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Power | Sacred | Self | Woman |

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life. The great enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy and your joy in you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.

Character | Difficulty | Happy | Intelligence | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Service | Success | Happiness |

Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange

It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.

Character | Good |

James Madison Mason

Our conscience is a fire within us, and our sins as the fuel; instead of warming, it will scorch us, unless the fuel be removed, or the heat of it allayed by penitential tears.

Character | Conscience | Tears | Will |

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Lord John Russell

Collision is as necessary to produce virtue in men as it is to elicit fire in inanimate matter; and chivalry is the essence of virtue.

Character | Men | Virtue | Virtue |

John Trusler

Men of splendid talents are generally too quick, too volatile, too adventurous, and too unstable to be much relied on; whereas men of common abilities, in a regular, plodding routine of business, act with more regularity and greater certainty. Men of the best intellectual abilities are apt to strike off suddenly, like the tangent of a circle, and cannot be brought into their orbits by attraction or gravity - they often act with such eccentricity as to be lost in the vortex of their own reveries. Brilliant talents in general are like the ignes fatui; they excite wonder, but often mislead. They are not, however, without their use; like the fire from the flint, once produced, it may be converted, by solid, thinking men, to very salutary and noble purposes.

Business | Character | Eccentricity | Men | Thinking | Wonder |

Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"

For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does.

Doubt | Experience | Intuition | Knowledge | Light | Man | Mind | Neglect | Rest | Wisdom |

Marion LeRoy Burton

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, and a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet.

Body | Diet | Excess | Gluttony | Health | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Hatred is like fire - it makes even light rubbish deadly.

Light | Wisdom |

Margaret Fuller, fully Sara Margaret Fuller, Marchese Ossoli

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.

Body | Mind | Wisdom |

Edmund Gosse, fully Sir Edmund William Gosse

Cling to the flying hours; and yet let one pure hope, one great desire, like song on dying lips be set - that ere we fall in scattered fire our hearts may life the world's heart higher.

Desire | Heart | Hope | Life | Life | Wisdom | World |

William James

We wish to preserve the fire of the past, not the ashes.

Past | Wisdom |