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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Unlike grownups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

Children | Little | Need | Wisdom |

Ellen Goodman

The figures prove that the absolute easiest way to be poor is to be born out of wedlock to a young woman. If you need a statistic to memorize, try this one: 92.8 percent of all children in black, single female-headed families where the mother is under thirty and did not complete high school, are in poverty.

Absolute | Children | Mother | Need | Poverty | Wisdom | Woman |

Benjamin R. Haydon

It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also His infinite justice.

God | Justice | Mercy | Need | Wisdom | God |

Lawrence Hyde, 1st Earl of Rochester

It is undeniable that a man needs to be provided with some sort of philosophical background for his existence. And still more... does he need to be provided with a proper system of transcendental cosmology. But it remains true that the primary concern of the seeker after spiritual fulfillment is not with philosophy, but with wisdom.

Existence | Fulfillment | Man | Need | Philosophy | System | Wisdom |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

Education | Need | Wisdom |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Both these perspectives - that the government is responsible for us, and that we are responsible only for ourselves - are dehumanizing. To be fully human, we can neither give up responsibility for ourselves nor refuse responsibility for others. Indeed, we need to redefine individual responsibility to include social responsibility.

Government | Individual | Need | Responsibility | Wisdom | Government |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness.

Abundance | Books | Creativity | Determination | Global | Love | Meaning | Need | People | Position | Poverty | War | Will | Wisdom | Work | Leadership |

Mahlon Hoagland

As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder.

Age | Beauty | Children | Conformity | Curiosity | Experience | Hunger | Need | Science | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Beauty | Value |

Thomas Hughes

When shall we learn that he who multiplieth possessions, multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be his who hath need of them?

Need | Possessions | Troubles | Wisdom | Learn |

Wes Jackson

Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole.

Nature | Need | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Think |

Osa Johnson, née Leighty

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put foundations under them.

Need | Wisdom | Work |

R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

Death | Madness | Need | Wisdom |

Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange

Parasites and liars have need of good memories.

Good | Need | Wisdom |

Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering

We need to teach the highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

Cause | Disgrace | Failure | Need | Teach | Wisdom | World | Failure | Learn |

Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz

All things are understood by God a priori, as eternal truths; for he does not need experience, and yet all things are known by him adequately. We, on the other hand, know scarcely anything adequately, and only a few things a priori; most things we know by experience, in the case of which other principles and other criteria must be applied.

Eternal | Experience | God | Need | Principles | Wisdom | God |