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

Alexander Pope

All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Character | Looks |

Bachya Ibn Pekudah

Many people fail to enjoy what they have because they keep desiring what they lack. As soon as they obtain one thing, they automatically seek to acquire something else. All the good things they already have are considered as unimportant in their eyes.

Character | Good | People |

Abbé Raynal

The world is governed by three things - wisdom, authority, and appearance. Wisdom for thoughtful people, authority for rough people, and appearances for the great mass of superficial people who can look only at the outside.

Appearance | Authority | Character | People | Wisdom | World |

Richard H. Rice, fully Richard Henry Rice

The mature man knows that he is likely to make mistakes. He wants to take responsibility for them. Only by facing his mistakes does he learn to act more responsibly.

Character | Man | Responsibility | Wants | Learn |

Cardinal de Retz, Jean Francois-Paul de Gondil

One of man's greatest failings is that he looks almost always for an excuse, in the misfortune that befalls him through his own fault, before looking for a remedy - which means he often finds the remedy too late.

Character | Fault | Looks | Man | Means | Misfortune | Misfortune |

W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross

It would be a mistake to found a natural science on ‘what we really think’ ... opinions are interpretations, and often misinterpretations, of sense-experience; and the man of science must appeal from these to sense-experience itself, which furnishes his real data. In ethics no such appeal is possible... the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a natural science.

Character | Convictions | Ethics | Experience | Man | Mistake | People | Science | Sense |

Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL

Many good people admire what is bad, but no one condemns what is good.

Character | Good | People |

Nicholas Rescher

One cannot properly appreciate the human realities so long as one labors under the adolescent delusion that people get the fates they deserve.

Character | Delusion | People |

Arthur Rubenstein

I must accept life unconditionally. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.

Character | Life | Life | People | Happiness |

Nancy Reagan, born Anne Frances Robbins

Love means giving one’s self to another person fully, not just physically. When two people really love each other, this helps them to stay alive and grow. One must be loved to grow. Love’s such a precious and fragile thing that when it comes we have to hold on tightly. And when it comes, we’re very lucky because for some it never comes at all. If you have love, you’re wealthy in a way that can never be measured.

Character | Giving | Love | Means | People | Self |

Albert Schweitzer

Only by means of reverence for life can we establish a spiritual and human relationship with both people and all living creatures within our reach.

Character | Life | Life | Means | People | Relationship | Reverence |

Sydney Smith

That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward.

Better | Character | Charity | Duty | Future | God | Hope | Ingratitude | Labor | Looks | Man | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Work | World | God |