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

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

What is a miracle? The natural law of a unique event.

Law | Unique | Wisdom |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life.

Art | Chance | Civilization | Contradiction | Feelings | Harmony | Imagination | Law | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Necessity | Play | Reality | Reason | Thought | Unity | Wisdom | Art | Thought |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Law being purely the declaration of the general will, it is clear that, in the exercise of the legislative power, the people cannot be represented; but in that of the executive power, which is only the force that is applied to giver the law effect, it both can and should be represented.

Force | Law | People | Power | Will | Wisdom |

Richard Rovere

Politicians cannot afford to deal in finalities and ultimate truths; they abide, by and large, by probabilities and reasonable assumptions and the law of averages.

Law | Wisdom |

Ignazio Silone , original name Secondo Transqulli

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men.

Equality | Law | Men | Practice | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

No more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause.

Cause | Law | Nature | Reason | Wisdom |

John Selden

Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because it is an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell me how to confute him.

Ignorance | Law | Man | Men | Will | Wisdom |

Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

Old age is not one of the beauties of creation, but it is one of its harmonies. The law of contrasts is one of the laws of beauty. Under the conditions of our climate, shadow gives light its worth; sternness enhances mildness; solemnity, splendor. Varying proportions of size support and subserve one another.

Age | Beauty | Law | Light | Old age | Size | Wisdom | Worth |

Daniel Webster

The law is made to protect the innocent by punishing the guilty.

Law | Wisdom |

Daniel Webster

The criminal law is not founded on the principle of vengeance; it uses evil only as a means of preventing greater evil.

Evil | Law | Means | Vengeance | Wisdom |

James Thurber and Elliott Nugent

Do you know the first law of human nature? Self-propagation.

Human nature | Law | Nature | Self | Wisdom |

Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

Human law has the true nature of law only in so far as it corresponds to the right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. In so far as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence.

Eternal | Law | Nature | Reason | Right |

Jean Bodin

If justice is the end of the law, the law the work of the prince, and the prince the image of god, it follows of necessity that the law of the prince should be modeled on the law of God.

God | Justice | Law | Necessity | Work |

James Luther Adams

In its purest form music is not a representational but rather a nonobjective, nonverbal world, it is a world of its own, almost a creatio ex hihilo, an occasion for immediacy of experience, a nonreducible mode of beauty, of contrast and resolution, of order and ecstasy flowing through and beyond the order. Order, and ecstasy rooted in order: that sounds like the relation between law and love, law and gospel.

Beauty | Contrast | Ecstasy | Experience | Law | Love | Music | Order | Resolution | World |