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

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

It is the easiest thing in the world for us to obey God when He command us to do what we like, and to trust Him when the path is all sunshine. The real victory of faith is to trust God in the dark, and through the dark. Let us be assured of this, that if the lesson and the rod are of His appointing, and that His all-wise love has engineered the deep tunnel of trial on the heavenward road, He will never desert us during the discipline. The vital thing for us is not to deny and desert Him.

Discipline | Faith | God | Lesson | Love | Trust | Will | Wisdom | Wise | World | Trial | God |

Donald Davidson

False beliefs tend to undermine the identification of the subject matter; to undermine, therefore, the validity of a description of the belief as being about that subject... The more things a believer is right about, the sharper his errors are. To much mistake simply blurs the focus.

Belief | Focus | Mistake | Right | Wisdom |

Frank Moore Colby

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Good | Politics | Wisdom | Wise |

Agatha Christie, fully Dame Agatha Miller Christie

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Nothing | War | Wisdom |

Hermann Cohen

Ethics is the vital principle of Judaism. Its religion aims to be, and is, moral doctrine. Love of God is knowledge of God, and that is knowledge of the ultimate moral purpose of mankind.

Aims | Doctrine | Ethics | God | Knowledge | Love | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Religion | Wisdom | God |

Russell W. Davenport, fully Russell Wheeler Davenport

Progress in every age results only from the fact that there are some men and women who refuse to believe that what they knew to be right cannot be done.

Age | Men | Progress | Right | Wisdom |

John Dewey

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise.

Circumstances | Extreme | Mankind | Right | Wisdom | Think |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

If I had my life to live again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Wisdom | Loss |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

The secret of happiness (and therefore of success) is to be in harmony with existence, to be always willing "to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot," to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

Existence | Harmony | Life | Life | Little | Success | Universe | Wisdom | Happiness |

Rufus Choate

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Fortune | Happy | Love | Reading | Wisdom | Youth |

Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race

Determination | Education | Genius | Human race | Men | Nothing | Persistence | Problems | Race | Will | Wisdom | World | Talent |

Frances Power Cobbe

Love naturally reverses the idea of obedience, and causes the struggle between any; two who truly love each other to be, not who shall command, but who shall yield.

Love | Obedience | Struggle | Wisdom |

Babette Deutsch

The poets were among the first to realize the hollowness of a world in which love is made to seem as standardized as plumbing, and death is actually a mechanized industry.

Death | Industry | Love | Wisdom | World |

Thomas Dekker

To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day with reverence for the opportunities it contains; to approach my work with a clean mind; to hold ever before me, even in the doing of little things, the Ultimate Purpose toward which I am working; to meet men and women with laughter on my lips and love in my heart; to be gentle, kind and courteous through all the hours; to approach the night with weariness that ever woos sleep and the joy that goes with work well done - this is how I desire to waste wisely my days.

Day | Desire | Heart | Joy | Laughter | Little | Love | Men | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Reverence | Smile | Waste | Wisdom | Work |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

Heart | Hope | Life | Life | Love | Man | Trust | Wisdom | Woe |