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

Hans Hoffman

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Ability | Character | Means | Wisdom |

Harriet Van Horne

The way a man speaks lays bare the texture of his mind, the goodness of his heart, the inner pain or the sweet serenity that are his companions in solitude.

Character | Heart | Man | Mind | Pain | Serenity | Solitude |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates.

Character | Good | Means | Men | Reason | Religion | Worship |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

When, in our pain, we turn our attention to life’s purpose, we take up pain as a thread through the labyrinth... But when we deny pain, we are denying life itself. When we flee from pain that we cannot escape, we are fleeing from an opportunity to grow.

Attention | Character | Life | Life | Opportunity | Pain | Purpose | Purpose |

David Hume

Delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pain as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.

Character | Mankind | Pain | Passion | Rest | Taste | Happiness |

William James

The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

Character | Conduct | Means | Truth |

Thomas Jefferson

Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.

Character | Means | Men |

David Hume

Custom is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared I the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.

Action | Character | Custom | Ends | Events | Experience | Future | Influence | Life | Life | Means | Memory | Past | Present | Speculation |

Thomas Jefferson

Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. Never spend your money before you have earned it. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold. We seldom report of having eaten too little. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. How much pain evils have cost us that have never happened! Take things always by the smooth handle. When angry, count ten before you speak, if very angry, count a hundred.

Character | Cost | Day | Hunger | Little | Money | Nothing | Pain | Pride | Trouble |

Pinchos Hurwitz

A large amount of physical pain and suffering is caused by one’s thoughts and behaviors. The desire for food causes people to overeat and consume food that is harmful to their health. Envy, anger, and honor-seeking lead to diseases of the heart, high blood pressure, nervous tension and excessive stress. Moreover, even when you pain is basically caused by physical symptoms, your mental attitude towards the pain can greatly increase or decrease the actual amount of suffering you experience. The pain you suffer from illnesses and injuries is frequently more psychological than physical. A person who learns to master a calm and serene attitude towards life trains himself to tolerate physical pain and the actual suffering is greatly lessened.

Anger | Character | Desire | Envy | Experience | Health | Heart | Honor | Life | Life | Pain | People | Suffering |

David Hume

It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature. But it is pretended that some causes are necessary, some not necessary.

Cause | Chance | Character | Existence | Means | Nature | Nothing | Power |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Character | Ends | Justify | Means | Nature | Reason |

Juan Ramón Jimenez, fully Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

Character | Desire | Haste | Life | Life | Means | Right | Time |

William James

There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Character | Education | Genius | Ideas | Little | Means | Mind | Struggle | Truth | Old |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

I began to accept that the meaning of life, even the purpose of the pain that accompanies it, would be found not in the question I asked of life, but in the questions life asked of me.

Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Pain | Purpose | Purpose | Question |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.

Character | Conduct | God | Indispensable | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Virtue | Virtue | God |

William James

Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.

Absence | Character | Faith | Means | Men |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

I have often seen individuals who simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through the widening of his view, the insoluble problem, lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out in contrast to a new and strong life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so became different itself. What, on a lower level, had led the wildest conflicts and emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that instead of being in it, one is now above it.

Character | Consciousness | Contrast | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | Light | Means | Panic | Personality | Reality |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship means contact, communion. There cannot be communion where people are divided by ideas. A belief may gather a group of people around itself. Such a group will inevitably breed opposition and so form another group with a different belief. Ideas postpone direct relationship with the problem.

Belief | Character | Ideas | Means | Opposition | People | Relationship | Will |