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

Louis-Aimé Martin

If you would know the political and moral condition of a people, ask as to the position of its women.

Character | People | Position |

Mateo Alemán, fully Mateo Alemán y de Enero

That poverty which is not the daughter of the spirit is but the mother of shame and reproach; it is a disreputation that drowns all the other good parts that are in man; it is a disposition to all kind of evil; it is a man’s greatest foe.

Character | Daughter | Evil | Good | Man | Mother | Poverty | Shame | Spirit |

Katharine Anthony, fully Katharine Susan Anthony

Foremost among the barriers to equality is the system which ignores the mother’s service to Society in making a home and rearing children. The mother is still the uncharted servant of the future, who receives from her husband, at his discretion, a share in his wages.

Character | Children | Discretion | Equality | Future | Husband | Mother | Service | Society | System | Society |

Henry Brooke

The worst of slaves is he whom passion rules.

Character | Passion |

Rupert Brooke

The worst of slaves is he whom passion rules.

Character | Passion |

Jean de La Bruyère

The strongest passion is fear.

Character | Fear | Passion |

James Boswell

There is no passion so distressing as fear, which gives us great pain and makes us appear contemptible in our own eyes to the last degree. Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

Character | Fear | Government | Men | Order | Pain | Passion |

Thomas Brooks

When you have overcome one temptation, you must be ready to enter the lists with another. As distrust, in some sense, is the mother of safety, so security is the gate of danger. A man had need to fear this most of all, that he fears not at all.

Character | Danger | Distrust | Fear | Man | Mother | Need | Security | Sense | Temptation |

Horace Bushnell

Respectable sin is, in principle, the mother of all basest crime. Follow it to the bitter end, and there is ignominy as well as guilt eternal.

Character | Crime | Eternal | Guilt | Ignominy | Mother | Sin |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy. The charlatan is verbose and assumptive; the Pharisee is ostentatious, because he is a hypocrite. Pride is the master sin of the Devil; and the Devil is the father of lies.

Character | Devil | Father | Hypocrisy | Ostentation | Pride | Sin |

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man; it effects nothing it goes about; and hurts the man who is possessed by it more directly than any other against whom it is directed.

Anger | Character | Man | Mind | Nothing | Passion |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness — its opposite — never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.

Character | Diligence | Fortune | Good | Idleness | Man | Mother |

William Ellery Channing

The more discussion the better, if passion and personality be eschewed; and discussion, even if stormy, often winnows truth from error - a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age.

Age | Better | Character | Discussion | Error | Good | Passion | Personality | Truth |

Tyron Edwards

Whatever our place, allotted to us by Providence, that for us is the post of honor and duty. God estimates us not by the position we are in, but by the way in which we fill it.

Character | Duty | God | Honor | Position | Providence | God |

W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon

The astonishing thing about him [man] is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely passion for ideas and ideals, far removed from his material surroundings and animal activities, and in no way suggested by them, yet for which, such is his affection, he is willing to endure toils and privations, to sacrifice pleasures, to disdain griefs and frustrations. The inner truth is that every man is himself a creator, by birth and nature, an artist, an architect and fashioner of worlds.

Birth | Character | Disdain | Ideals | Ideas | Man | Nature | Passion | Sacrifice | Truth | Vision |

Tyron Edwards

The first impulse of conscience is apt to be right; the first impulse of appetite or passion is generally wrong. We should be faithful to the former, but suspicious of the latter.

Appetite | Character | Conscience | Impulse | Passion | Right | Wisdom | Wrong |