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

Robert Dodsley

Though a taste of pleasure may quicken the relish of life, an unrestrained indulgence leads to inevitable destruction.

Character | Indulgence | Inevitable | Life | Life | Pleasure | Taste |

Declaration of Independence NULL

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Self | Truths |

Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler

If a person demands to have everything he wishes, the lack of even a small pleasure can make him feel extremely unhappy. Excessive demands can even lead some people to consider their entire lives as worthless if they are missing some minor pleasure that they arbitrarily demand.

Character | People | Pleasure | Wishes |

Felix Frankfurter

Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.

Aims | Candor | Character | Confidence | Ends | Fear | Freedom | Life | Life | Men | Security | Self | Society | Society |

Bernard Grasset

The chimerical pursuit of perfection is always linked to some important deficiency, frequently the inability to love.

Character | Important | Love | Perfection |

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known by pseudonymn Peter Parley

Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue and renders a man, in the pursuit or defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition in contempt.

Character | Consciousness | Contempt | Courage | Defense | Fear | Man | Opposition | Right | Virtue | Virtue |

Benjamin R. Haydon

No man, perhaps, is so wicked as to commit evil for its own sake. Evil is generally committed under the hope of some advantage the pursuit of virtue seldom obtains. Yet the most successful result of the most virtuous heroism is never without its alloy.

Character | Evil | Hope | Man | Virtue | Virtue |

Thomas Jefferson

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Sacred | Truths |

David Hume

Human happiness seems to consists in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition.

Action | Character | Indolence | Pleasure | Happiness |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man.

Age | Character | Contempt | Individual | Indulgence | Man | Pleasure | Sensuality |

John Knox

Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and fortune.

Art | Character | Enthusiasm | Excellence | Fortune | Object | Practice | Time | Excellence | Vicissitudes | Art |

Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind.

Character | Little | Mind | Pleasure | Revenge |

Kuzari or The Kitab al Khazari written by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi NULL

One’s pleasure is enhanced by the duty of saying blessings over everything he enjoys or that happens to him.

Blessings | Character | Duty | Pleasure |

Jacques Lacan, fully Jacques Marie Émile Lacan

As a special mirage, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of the pleasure reference, of that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective centred on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.

Character | Love | Pleasure |

Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

Revenge is the abject pleasure of an abject mind.

Character | Mind | Pleasure | Revenge |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

He can feel no little wants who is in pursuit of grandeur.

Character | Little | Wants |