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

Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

These things may even lead to an understanding of something that can also be observed externally. In countries where, according to statistics, sugar consumption is low, the inhabitants have a less defined personality than in countries where consumption is high. If you visit countries where the people show more individuality, where each individual is self-contained, and then move on to countries where the inhabitants betray more the typical racial characteristics, show less individuality in their outward appearance, you will find that in the former countries sugar consumption is high, in the latter very low.

Revelation | Sense | World |

Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education.... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments.

Better | Style |

S.G. Tallentyre, nom de plume for Evelyn Beatrice Hall

It is by character and not by intellect the world is won.

Heart | Style | Time |

Samuel Butler

A News-monger is a Retailer of Rumour, that takes up upon Trust, and sells as cheap as he buys. He deals in a perishable Commodity, that will not keep: for if it be not fresh it lies upon his Hands, and will yield nothing. True or false is all one to him; for Novelty being the Grace of bothe, a Truth grows stale as soon as a Lye.

Art | Attention | Little | Style | Art |

Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Understand |

Samuel Butler

It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.

Art | Good | Hope | Art |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him.

Order | Study | Time | Truth | Will | World | Zen |

Stephan Jay Gould

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.

Culture | Machines | Mind | Phenomena | Style | Success |

Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |

Stephan Jay Gould

Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with ‘roots’ of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than a barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food.

History | Question | Search | Style | Will | Writing | Victim |

Stephan Jay Gould

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.

Body | Change | Evolution | Future | Nothing | Organic | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Style | World | Learn |

Stephan Jay Gould

Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most modern evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of Neo-Darwinism.

Experiment | History | Little | Mind | Philosophy | Style | Thinking |

Stephan Jay Gould

Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback… toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.

Argument | Evolution | Ideas | Merit | Style | Theories | Time |

Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Imitation | Man | Style |

Theophrastus NULL

The Gossip is a person who, when he meets his friend, will assume a demure air, and ask with a smile — ‘Where are you from, and what are your tidings?

Style | Will |

Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

Down comes rain drop, bubble follows; On the house-top one by one Flock the synagogue of swallows, Met to vote that autumn's gone.

Dreams | Listening | Meaning | Opposition | Remorse | Soul | Style | Thought | Thought |

Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love.

Beauty | Enough | Good | Idleness | Man | Nothing | Occupation | Opinion | People | Play | Principles | Rights | Service | Sound | Superfluities | Will | Woman | Talent | Beauty | Think |

Thomas Adam

When I see others astonishingly blind to their failings, I suppose it to be my own case, and should think that man my friend who helps to open my eyes.

Better | Devil | Esteem | Good | Meaning | Nature | Nothing | Present | Style |

Thomas Jefferson

The sheep are happier of themselves than under the care of a wolf.

Government | Style | Submission | Title | Government |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

Beauty | Dignity | Sense | Simplicity | Style | Beauty |