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

Paul Mairet

Not sixteen per cent of the human race is, or ever has been, engaged in any of the kinds of activity at which they excel.

Human race | Race | Wisdom |

Walter Lippmann

The uprooting of human beings from the land, the concentration in cities, the breakdown of the authority of family, of tradition, and of moral conventions, the complexity and the novelty of modern life, and finally the economic insecurity of our industrial system have called into being the modern social worker. They perform a function in modern society which is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.

Absolute | Authority | Family | Insecurity | Land | Life | Life | Luxury | Necessity | Novelty | Society | System | Tradition | Wisdom | Society | Novelty |

Robert E. Lyon

Modern man seems to be afraid of silence. We are conditioned by radio and television on which every minute must be filled with talking, or some kind of sound. We are stimulated by the American philosophy of keeping on the move all the time - busy, busy, busy. This tends to make us shallow. A person's life can be deepened tremendously by periods of silence, used in the constructive ways of meditation and prayer. Great personalities have spent much time in the silence of life.

Life | Life | Man | Meditation | Philosophy | Prayer | Silence | Sound | Talking | Television | Time | Wisdom | Afraid |

Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. By modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

Property | System | Wisdom |

Robert S. MacArthur

Men seldom die of hard work; activity is God's medicine. The highest genius is willingness and ability to do hard work. Any other conception of genius makes it a doubtful, if not a dangerous possession.

Ability | Genius | God | Men | Wisdom | Work |

James Russell Lowell

You may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

Dogma | Men | Nothing | Sincerity | System | Will | Wisdom | Work |

Alexander Maclaren

As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being. God speaks for the most pat in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.

God | Joy | Little | Love | Silence | Soul | Truth | Wills | Wisdom | God |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Life | Life | Man | People | Wisdom |

Charles Horace Mayo

Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system and profoundly affects the health. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt.

Doubt | Health | Heart | Man | System | Wisdom | Worry |

Peter Minard

Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws form the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary. The exodus from slavery toward the possession of the Kingdom.

Absence | Noise | Order | Peace | Silence | Slavery | Wisdom |

William Mountford

Never, never do great thoughts come to a man while he is discontented or fretful. There must be quiet in the temple of his soul before the windows of it will open for him to see out of them into the infinite. Quiet is what heavenly powers move in. It is in silence that the stars move on, and it is in quiet that our souls are visited from on high.

Man | Quiet | Silence | Soul | Will | Wisdom |

John Boyle O'Reilly

Be silent and safe - silence never betrays you.

Safe | Silence | Wisdom |

Max Picard

The language of the child is silence transformed into sound: the language of the adult is sound that seeks for silence.

Language | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | Child |

Thomas Paine

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system.

Mind | Religion | System | Wisdom |

Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected, if day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, our soul exists in space inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.

Body | Day | Health | Life | Life | Majority | Misfortune | Nothing | Soul | Space | System | Wisdom |