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

Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire

When we were young and I fell in love with Malcolm, I thought he was beautiful and I still do. The thought of him dead is really something very sad. We hadn't been in touch for a long time.

Gold |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

Day | Gold | Luxury | Memory | Necessity | Pity | Public | Reason | Will | Child | Old |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.

Battle | Darkness | Death | Energy | Gloom | Gold | Light |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Beauty | Control | Gold | Good | Truth | World | Beauty |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear, pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Gold | Men | Sense | Writing |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

Gold | Light |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

Gold |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The earth upon which the sea, and the rivers and the waters, upon which food and the tribes of men have arisen, upon which this breathing, moving life exists, shall afford us precedence in drinking.

Earth | Gold | Wealth |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The selfishness fouling your love is veiling divinity from your vision. What is the reason for the selfishness which is veiling divinity from us? It is simply our attachment to the body; It is the weakness of our mind and our enslavement to our senses.

Gold | Lord |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

Nobody can boast of never having been despised.

Gold |

Turkish Proverbs

A guest comes with ten blessings, eats one and leaves nine.

Gold |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Gold |

Turkish Proverbs

With talking the cheese ship won't move.

Gold | Thinking | Understand |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

Age | Agony | Beauty | Body | Children | Cost | Counsel | Diversity | Energy | Enough | Evil | Genius | Gold | Government | Helpfulness | Individual | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Model | Riches | Strength | Struggle | Sympathy | System | Will | World | Riches | Government | Counsel | Beauty |

William Shakespeare

Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scoped this sorrow.

Gold | Play |

William Shakespeare

All goodness is poison to thy stomach.

Better | Dirty | Gold | Worship |

William Shakespeare

But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.... It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Othello, Act i, Scene 3

Gold | Love | Blessed |

William Morris

And there he saw a door within the wall, well-hinged, close shut; nor was there in that place another on its hinges, therefore he stood there and pondered for a little space and thought: "Perchance some marvel I shall see, for surely here some dweller there must be, because this door seems whole and new and sound, while nought but ruin I can see around".

Gold |

Douglas William Jerrold

It is wonderful how near conceit is to insanity!

Beauty | Gold | Indispensable | Price | Beauty |