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

Henry Ford

You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.

Character | Reputation |

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 |

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 |

French Student Revolt Graffiti NULL

The Revolution must take place in men before it can be manifest in things.

Character | Men | Revolution |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.

Associates | Character | Mediocrity | Rest | Wonder |

Jerome P. Fleishman

Do you know what real poverty is? It is never to have a big thought or a generous impulse.

Character | Impulse | Poverty | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Our best hope for the future is that the intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee that it would not fail to concede to human emotions, and to all that is determined by them, the position to which they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised by such a domination of reason would prove to be the strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare the way for further unifications. Whatever, like the ban laid upon thought by religion, opposes such a development is a danger for the future of mankind.

Character | Danger | Emotions | Force | Future | Guarantee | Hope | Mankind | Men | Mind | Nature | Position | Reason | Religion | Spirit | Thought | Time | Danger | Intellect | Thought |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

Action | Capacity | Character | Thought | Thought |

Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

A man who feels that his religion is a slavery has not begun to comprehend the real nature of religion.

Character | Man | Nature | Religion | Slavery |

Armand Hammer

I believe we are here to do good. It is the responsibility of every human being to aspire to do something worthwhile, to make this world a better place than the one he found. Life is a gift, and if we agree to accept it, we must contribute in return. When we fail to contribute, we fail to adequately answer why we are here.

Better | Character | Good | Life | Life | Responsibility | World |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Anger | Character | Control | Madness | Passion | Will |

Madame Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon

There are three kinds of silence. Silence from words is good, because inordinate speaking tends to evil. Silence, or rest from desires and passions is still better, because it promotes quietness of spirit. But the best of all is silence from unnecessary and wandering thoughts, because that is essential to internal recollection, and because it lays a foundation for a proper reputation and for silence in other respects.

Better | Character | Evil | Good | Reputation | Rest | Silence | Spirit | Words |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility, poverty, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.

Character | Death | Humility | Poverty | Religion | Reverence | Suffering |

Richard M. Hare, fully Richard Mervyn Hare

It is, most fundamentally, because moral judgments are universablizable that we can speak of moral thought as rational (to universalize is to give the reason); and their prescriptivity is very intimately connected with our freedom to form our own moral opinions (only those free to think and act need a prescriptive language).

Character | Freedom | Language | Need | Reason | Thought | Think | Thought |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.

Character | Endurance | Pride | Religion |

Thomas Hobbes

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame; which verbal discourse cannot do, farther than the judgment shall approve of the time, place and persons.

Blame | Character | Grave | Judgment | Light | Man | Shame | Time |

James Patrick Griffin

A person who utters words, or does acts of admiration, gratitude, or appreciation only on utilitarian grounds becomes a person without admiration, gratitude or appreciation. If utilitarianism has no place for desert, desert has no place for utilitarianism either.

Admiration | Appreciation | Character | Gratitude | Words | Appreciation |

Aaron Hill

Shun fear, it is the ague of the soul! a passion man created for himself - for sure that cramp of nature could not dwell in the warm realms of glory.

Character | Fear | Glory | Man | Nature | Passion | Soul |

Richard Heinzelmann

Be and continue poor, young man, while others around you grow rich by; fraud and disloyalty; be without place or power, while others beg their way upwards; bear the pain of disappointed hopes, while others gain their by; flattery; forego the gracious pressure of the hand, for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have, in such a course, grown gray; with unblenched honor, bless God and die.

Character | Disloyalty | Flattery | Fraud | Friend | God | Honor | Man | Pain | Power | Virtue | Virtue | God |

Hans Hoffman

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Character | Meaning | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |