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

Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

A relevant, famous quote from the Tao is "Ruling a country is like frying a small fish". A good chef will tell you that, when frying a fish (especially a small one), if you keep moving the frying pan and flipping the fish, it will fall apart and become tasteless.

Indignation | Quiet |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Your thoughts are something that you control and they originate with you.

Quiet | Right | Soul | Space | Will |

Wayne Muller

All life requires a rhythm of rest.

God | Life | Life | Music | Quiet | God |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Tapping into the essence of originating Spirit, emulating the attributes of the creative force of intention, and manifesting into your life anything that you desire that's consistent with the universal mind...

God | Meditation | Quiet | Sound | Success | Time | God |

Wayne Muller

We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors to one another, to seek those who reflect with compassion and a keen eye how we are doing, whether we seem centered or off course ... we need the nourishing company of others to create the circle needed for growth, freedom and healing.

Conversation | Day | Eternal | Growth | Land |

Wendell Berry

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Agony | Earth | Good | Grace | Labor | Life | Life | Luxury | World | Learn | Think |

Wendell Berry

And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.

Earth | Need | Quiet |

Wendell Berry

The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it.

Beauty | Despair | Fear | Forethought | Grace | Life | Life | Peace | Rest | Sound | Time | Waiting | World | Beauty |

Wendell Berry

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the wind waves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

Machines | Nothing | Quiet | Silence | World |

Wendell Berry

It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.

Enough | Freedom | Giving | Illusion | Man | Money | Noise | Peace | People | Play | Promise | Quiet | Slavery | Wonder | Old | Think |

Wendell Berry

Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Earth | Love | Need | Quiet |

Welsh Proverbs

When the steersmen are many the ship will sink.

Will |

William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

The nightingale has a lyre of gold, the lark's is a clarion call, and the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, but I love him best of all. For his song is all the joy of life, and we in the mad spring weather, we two have listened till he sang our hearts and lips together.

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

Light | World |

Wendell Berry

The sense of it may come with watching a flock of cedar waxwings eating wild grapes in the top of the woods on a November afternoon. Everything they do is leisurely. They pick the grapes with a curious deliberation comb their feathers, converse in high windy whistles. Now and then one will fly out and back in a sort of dancing flight full of whimsical flutters and turns. They are like farmers loafing in their own fields on Sunday. Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of Sabbaths.

Quiet |

William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Sense |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.

Abstract | Body | Children | Dawn | Day | Fidelity | Hope | Insult | Love | Soul | Thinking | Time | Will | World | Insult |

William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Influence | Quiet | Work |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.

Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

Awakening | Justice | Life | Life | Past | People | Right | Will | Worth |