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

Tibetan Proverbs

Don't trust a hungry man to watch your rice.

Fortune | Good | Praise |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

Advice | Inevitable | People |

Tom Hopkins

Internalization. This occurs when you've exploited impact, when you've molded the standard material to your needs and made it yours, when you've made your new skills strong through hard use. All of a sudden these new concepts stopped churning within you, and a new reality is born You and the concepts are one. They have literally become you. You have become them.

Advice |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however I shall protest their taxes at every opportunity – and if Wodon or Shiva or Buddha or that Christian fellow – what’s his name? – cannot respect that, then I accept their wrath.

Death | Doubt | Friends |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Joy in spite of everything is yanking the bell rope despite physical affliction — it has become my Quasi Motto. One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor.

Babble | Need | Friends |

William Shakespeare

All is not offence that indiscretion finds, and dotage terms so.

Art | Better | Death | Fortune | Grave | Heart | Right | Soul | Teach | Art | Friends |

William Shakespeare

Ah, Buckingham, now do I play the touch, to try if thou be current gold indeed: young Edward lives.

Life | Life | Means | Praise |

William Shakespeare

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Praise |

William Shakespeare

Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? No. The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son was kinder to his father than my daughters got 'tween the lawful sheets. To 't, luxury, pell-mell, for I lack soldiers. King Lear, Act iv, Scene 6

Persuasion | Praise | Words |

William Shakespeare

And there at Venice gave His body to that pleasant country's earth, And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colours he had fought so long.

Friends |

William Shakespeare

And whatsomever else shall hap tonight, give it an understanding but no tongue, I will requit your love. So, fare your well. My lord, he hath importuned me with love, in honourable fashion. Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2

Advice | Appetite | Counsel | God | Play | Soul | Thinking | Counsel | God |

William Shakespeare

Allow not nature more than nature needs. King Lear, Act ii, Scene 4

Little | Praise |

William Shakespeare

And thus I clothe my naked villany with old odd ends, stol'n out of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Gloucester at I, iii)

Argument | Courtesy | Love | Mourning | Sorrow | Friends |

William Shakespeare

Black brows they say become some women best, so that there be not too much hair there, but in a semicircle, or a half-moon made with a pen.

Chance | Death | Life | Life | Love | Friends |

William Shakespeare

Censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge. Julius Caesar, Act iii, Scene 2

Adventure | Better | Counsel | Fear | Little | Reputation | Strength | Will | Wishes | World | Counsel | Friends | Guilty |

William Shakespeare

Boy, what sign is it when a man of great spirit grows melancholy? Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act I, Scene 2

Praise |

Brendan Francis Behan

There's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.

Advice |

William Shakespeare

Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down. Come, quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap.

Art | Art | Friends |

William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters

The conqueror is regarded with awe the wise man commands our respect but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection

Reason | Sense | Friends |

William James

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.

Praise |