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

Christian Nestell Bovee

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire. A generous habit of thought and action carries with it an incalculable influence.

Action | Character | Example | Habit | Influence | Reason | Thought | Thought |

Jean de La Bruyère

Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life; cunning is a kind of instinct, that only looks after our immediate interests and welfare. Discretion is only found in men of strong sense and good understanding; cunning is often to be met with in brutes themselves, and in persons who are but the fewest removes from them.

Character | Cunning | Discretion | Good | Instinct | Life | Life | Looks | Men | Perfection | Reason | Sense | Understanding |

Jean de La Bruyère

I am a fellow citizen of all men who think. Truth; that is my country.

Character | Men | Truth |

Hugh Blair

Such is the infatuation of self-love, that, though in general doctrine of the vanity world all men agree, yet almost everyone flatters himself that his own case is to be an exception from the common rule.

Character | Doctrine | Love | Men | Rule | Self | Self-love | World |

Carl Victor de Bonstetten

To speak well supposes a habit of attention which shows itself in the thought; by language we learn to think and above all to develop thought.

Attention | Character | Habit | Language | Thought | Wisdom | Learn | Think |

Christian Nestell Bovee

Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.

Character | Fear | Good | Men | Wrong |

William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Character | Men |

Thomas Chalmers

Benevolence is not in word and in tongue, but in deed and in truth. It is a business with men as they are, and with human life as drawn by the rough hand of experience. It is a duty which you must perform at the call of principle; though there be no voice of eloquence to give splendor to your exertions, and no music of poetry to lead your willing footsteps through the bowers of enchantment. It is not the impulse of high and ecstatic emotion. It is an exertion of principle. :You must go to the poor man’s cottage, though no verdure flourish around it, the gentleness of its murmurs. If you look for the romantic simplicity of fiction you will be disappointed; but it is your duty to persevere in spite of every discouragement. Benevolence is not merely a feeling but a principle; not a dream of rapture for the fancy to indulge in, but a business for the hand to execute.

Benevolence | Business | Character | Duty | Experience | Gentleness | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Men | Music | Poetry | Simplicity | Truth | Will | Business |

Frank Chin

In Confucianism, all of us - men and women - are born soldiers. The soldier is the universal individual. No matter what you do for a living - doctor, lawyer, fisherman, thief - you are a fighter. Life is war. The war is to maintain personal integrity in a world that demands betrayal and corruption. All behavior is strategy and tactics. All relationships are martial. Marriages are military alliances.

Behavior | Betrayal | Character | Corruption | Individual | Integrity | Life | Life | Men | War | World |

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, fully Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, conte di Cavour

The man who trusts men will make fewer mistakes than he who distrusts them.

Character | Man | Men | Will |

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

Envy is a week that grows in all soils and climates, and is no less luxuriant in the country than in the court; is not confined to any rank of men or extent of fortune, but rages in the breasts of all degrees.

Character | Envy | Fortune | Men | Rank |

Thomas Chalmers

Thousands of men breathe, move, and live, pass off the stage of life, and are heard of no more. Why? they do not partake of good in the world, and none were blessed by them; none could point to them as the means of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spake, could be recalled; and so they perished: their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storm of time can never destroy. Write your name, in kindness, love, and mercy, on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year: you will never be forgotten. No! your name, your deeds, will be as legible on the hearts you leave behind you as the stars on the brow of evening. Good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven.

Character | Darkness | Deeds | Good | Life | Life | Light | Man | Means | Men | Redemption | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Deeds | Blessed |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Some men never feel small; but these are the men who are.

Character | Men |

Frank Moore Colby

Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his existence?

Adventure | Character | Day | Existence | Heart | Man | Question | Wisdom |

William Camden

Young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be so.

Character | Men | Old | Think |

Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL

You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.

Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |