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

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

It is difficult to persuade mankind that the love of virtue is the love of themselves.

Love | Mankind | Virtue | Virtue |

Matthew Arnold

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Creed | Dogma | Future | Illusion | Life | Life | Mankind | Philosophy | Poetry | Race | Religion | Rest | Science | Time | Tradition | Will | World |

Napoleon Hill

The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire make a small amount of heat.

Achievement | Desire | Mind |

Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky

It's true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities - but they're destroying them because of a social structure that we've got to change, from the bottom up.

Change |

Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

Challenge | Freedom | Liberty | Oppression | Poverty | Right | Time | War |

Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.

Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |

Parke Godwin

The true source of cheerfulness is benevolence. The pursuits of mankind are commonly frigid and contemptible, and the mistake comes, at last, to be detected. But virtue is a charm that never fades. The soul that perceptually overflows with kindness and sympathy will always be cheerful.

Benevolence | Cheerfulness | Kindness | Mankind | Mistake | Soul | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue | Will |

Plato NULL

The belief in immortality depends finally upon the belief in God. If there exists a good and wise God, then there also exists a progress of mankind toward perfection; and if there be no progress of men towards perfection, then there cannot be a good and wise God. We cannot suppose that God’s moral government, the beginnings of which we see in the world and in ourselves, will cease when we leave this life.

Belief | God | Good | Government | Immortality | Life | Life | Mankind | Men | Perfection | Progress | Will | Wise | World |

Plato NULL

Of all the virtues, is not wisdom the one which the mass of mankind are always claiming, and which most arrouses in them a spirit of contention and lying conceit of wisdom?

Contention | Lying | Mankind | Spirit | Wisdom |

Plato NULL

The world is God's epistle to mankind - his thoughts are flashing upon us from every direction.

God | Mankind | World |

Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

Let us not accept violence as the way of peace. Let us instead begin by respecting true freedom: the resulting peace will be able to satisfy the world’s expectations, for it will be a peace built on justice, a peace founded on the incomparable dignity of the free human being.

Dignity | Freedom | Justice | Peace | Will | World |

Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

The greater part of mankind are more sensitive to contemptuous language, than to unjust acts; they can less easily bear insult than wrong.

Insult | Language | Mankind | Wrong | Insult |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All mankind love a lover.

Love | Mankind |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Art | Conversation | Man | Mankind | Art |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. The very hope of man. The thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.

God | Heart | Hope | Man | Mankind | Manners | Mercy | Nations | Religion | Risk | God |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The history of mankind is the history of arrested growth.

Growth | History | Mankind |

Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be black or they be white.

Compassion | Justice | Love | Need | Wisdom |