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

Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

Five great enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

Ambition | Anger | Avarice | Character | Envy | Peace | Pride |

Philemon NULL

Comparisons make enemies of our friends.

Character |

Walter T. Tatara

Surely the shortest commencement address in history - and for me one of the most memorable - was that of Dr. Harold E. Hyde, President of New Hampshire's Plymouth State College. He reduced his message to the graduating class to these three ideals: 'Know yourself - Socrates. Control yourself - Cicero; Give yourself - Christ'

Character | Control | History | Ideals |

Edward Wigglesworth

Common opinions often conflict with common sense; for reason in most minds is no match for prejudices, a hydra whose heads grow faster than they can be cut off.

Character | Common Sense | Reason | Sense |

Richard Whately

Those who get through the world without enemies are commonly three classes: the supple, the adroit, the phlegmatic. The leaden rule surmounts obstacles by yielding to them; the oiled wheel escapes friction; the cotton sack escapes damage by its impenetrable elasticity.

Character | Rule | World | Yielding |

Antisthenes NULL

Observe your enemies for they first find out your faults.

Wisdom |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it. This seems, indeed, to be contradictory, that loftiness should debase and lowliness exalt. But pious humility enables us to submit to what is above us; and nothing is more exalted above us than God; and therefore humility, by making us subject to God, exalts us. But pride, being a defect of nature, by the very act of refusing subjection and revolution from Him who is supreme, falls to a low condition.

Enough | God | Heart | Humility | Nature | Nothing | Pious | Pride | Revolution | Wisdom |

Bella Abzug

Congress is a very unrepresentative institution. Not only from an economic class point of view, but from every point of view - sex, race, age, vocation... These men in Congress don’t represent a homogeneous point of view. They represent their own point of view - by reason of their sex, background and class.

Age | Men | Race | Reason | Wisdom |

John Caird

Religion is not a perpetual moping over good books. Religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances, these are necessary to religion - no man can be religious without them. But religion is mainly and chiefly the glorifying of god amid the duties and trials of the world; the guiding of our course amid adverse winds and currents of temptation by the sunlight of duty and the compass of Divine truth, the bearing up manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honor of Christ, our great Leader in the conflict of life.

Books | Duty | God | Good | Honor | Life | Life | Man | Praise | Prayer | Religion | Temptation | Trials | Truth | Wisdom | World | God | Leader | Temptation |

Samuel Butler

Any class is all right if it will only let others be so.

Right | Will | Wisdom |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.

Atheism | Beauty | Fidelity | Hope | Men | Mother | People | Religion | Sensibility | Wisdom | Woman | Beauty |

Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz

If the aim of the military action is an equivalent for the political object, that action will in general diminish as the political object diminishes. The more this object comes to the front, the more will this be so. This explains how, without self-contradiction, there can be wars of all degrees of importance and energy, from a war of extermination down to a mere state of armed observation.

Action | Contradiction | Energy | Object | Observation | Self | War | Will | Wisdom |

Bernard d'Espagnat

The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and the facts established by experiment.

Consciousness | Doctrine | Existence | Experiment | Wisdom | World |

Alfred Duggan

If a conference lasts a long time, it must end in peace; no one can keep on defying his enemies all day.

Day | Peace | Time | Wisdom |