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

William Arthur

The regeneration of a sinner is an evidence of power in the highest sphere - moral nature; with the highest prerogative - to change nature; and operating to the highest result - not to create originally, which is great; but to create anew, which is greater.

Change | Character | Evidence | Nature | Power |

Arthur Aughey

Faith without evidence is, properly, not faith, but prejudice or presumption; faith beyond evidence is superstition, and faith contrary to evidence is either insanity or willful perversity of mind.

Character | Evidence | Faith | Insanity | Mind | Prejudice | Presumption | Superstition |

Tyron Edwards

Right actions for the future are the best explanations or apologies for wrong ones in the past; the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive.

Character | Evidence | Future | Past | Receive | Regret | Right | World | Wrong |

Sara Davidson

The ability to laugh at life is right at the top, with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humor has much to do with pain; it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel, so that we gain distance and through laughter, relief.

Ability | Character | Humor | Laughter | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Right | Wisdom |

Tyron Edwards

Sincerity is no test of truth - no evidence of correctness of conduct. You may take poison sincerely believing it the needed medicine, but will it save your life?

Character | Conduct | Correctness | Evidence | Life | Life | Sincerity | Truth | Will |

Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, born Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds; and these invaluable communication are within the reach of all.

Books | Character | Wisdom |

James Russell Lowell

The only conclusive evidence of a man’s sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

Character | Evidence | Life | Life | Man | Money | Practice | Sincerity | Truth | Words |

Marya Mannes

It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.

Better | Character | Enough | People |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Confidence in another man's virtue, is no slight evidence of one's own.

Character | Confidence | Evidence | Man | Virtue | Virtue |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.

Character | Despise | Enough | Evidence | Extreme | Good | Ignorance | Knowledge | Mother | Power | Stupidity | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wise | Value | Vice |

James Webb

Every human being has four hungers; the hunger of the loins, the hunger of the belly, the hunger of the mind, the hunger of the soul. You can get by a long time on the loins and the belly, but there is a good deal of evidence that even the meanest men eventually crave something for the mind and soul.

Character | Evidence | Good | Hunger | Men | Mind | Soul | Time |

Bruno Bettelheim

Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV.

Ability | Children | Danger | Day | Isolation | Life | Life | Meaning | Personality | Reality | Wisdom | Danger | Inertia | Learn |

Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland

For all his learning or sophistication, man is still instinctively reaching toward that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.

Arrogance | Evidence | Existence | Force | Learning | Man | Wisdom |

Bruce Burton

The observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind

Evidence | Mind | Observation | Poverty | Speech | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

The mind in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

Body | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Light | Mind | Nature | Revelation | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Books | Means | Men | Wisdom |