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

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Better mistrust undeserved than rash words.

Order | Words |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

Nearly everything possible has been done to spoil this game: the heavy financial interests... the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the Press... but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt, and it has gone out and conquered the world.

Compassion | Effort | God | History | Hope | Little | Need | People | Policy | Religion | Right | Will | God |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Body | Mind |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).

Focus | Knowledge | Mind | Reason | Research | Unique | Work | Following |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. 'Hobbits!' he thought. 'Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There's something mighty queer behind this.' He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.

Fraternity | Mind | World |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

Birth | Hope | World |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

Force | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | Mind | Trust | Think |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

A pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs. ~On the Church of England

Absurd | Life | Life | Think |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith.

Joy | Light | Mind | Sense | Thinking | Thought | Time | Thought |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazg–l, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.

Mind | Organization | Think |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way of pain.

Mind |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

For so sworn good or evil an oath may not be broken and it shall pursue oathkeeper and oathbreaker to the world's end.