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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

Character | People | Virtue | Virtue |

Francis Lockier

No one will ever shine in conversation who thinks of saying fine things; to please, one must say many things indifferent, and many very bad.

Character | Conversation | Will | Wisdom |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

Character | Majority | Mankind |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

There are many kinds of smiles, each having a distinct character. Some announce goodness and sweetness, others betray sarcasm, bitterness, and pride; some soften the countenance by their languishing tenderness, others brighten by their spiritual vivacity.

Bitterness | Character | Pride | Sarcasm | Tenderness |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Ah, how happy would many lives be if individuals troubled themselves as little about other people’s affairs as about their own!

Character | Happy | Little | People |

Thomas Merton

The more one seeks ‘the good’ outside oneself as something to be acquired, the more one is faced with the necessity of discussing, studying, understanding, analysing the nature of good. the more, therfore, one becomes involved in abstractions and in the confusion of divergent opinions. The more ‘the good’ is objectively analysed, the more it is treated as something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes.

Character | Good | Nature | Necessity | Understanding |

John T. McNicholas, fully John Timothy McNicholas

The God-given rights of parents are not understood or are ignored by our secularist educators and by many school administrators who, in the delusion of sovereignty, act as though they, not the parents, have complete control of the education of the child.

Character | Control | Delusion | Education | God | Parents | Rights |

George S. Merriam

The passion for truth has underlying it a profound conviction that what is real is best; that when we get to the heart of things we shall find there what we most need.

Character | Heart | Need | Passion | Truth |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Here is a wonder: we have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it. On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art. But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason.

Art | Character | Good | Poetry | Reason | Wonder | Understand |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgments as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal upon the account of his own choler; why then should fathers and pedants be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger? It is then no longer correction but revenge. Chastisement is instead of physic to children; an should we suffer a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?

Anger | Character | Children | Death | Men | Passion | Revenge | Right |

Julius Mark

Man's conquest of nature has been astonishing. His failure to conquer human nature has been tragic.

Character | Conquest | Failure | Human nature | Man | Nature | Wisdom | Failure |

Michael Murphy

Exceptional abilities develop most fully in cultures that prize them... no aspect of human nature is immune to social influence.

Character | Human nature | Influence | Nature |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The truth is that it is contrary to the nature of love if it is not violent, and contrary to the nature of violence if it is constant.

Character | Love | Nature | Truth |

Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL

The defects of human nature afford us opportunities of exercising our philosophy, the best employment of our virtues. If all men were righteous, all hearts true and frank and loyal, what use would our virtues be?

Character | Defects | Human nature | Men | Nature | Philosophy |

Alden C. Palmer

If one lives with Nature a little while, he soon recognizes the harmony of creation... Each of us is, therefore, an instrument of God. When one thinks of his humble self in this light, life takes on a more profound meaning.

Character | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Light | Little | Meaning | Nature | Self |