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

Elizabeth Gilbert

I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life?

Argument | Family | Friend | Good | History | Ideas | Woman | Think |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Listen to me. Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.

Emotions | Good | Happy | Ideas | Loneliness | Mind | Past | Time |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.

Eternal | Evolution | God | History | Humanity | Ideas | Individual | Longing | Means | Need | Nothing | Order | Peace | Providence | Right | Sacred | Search | Spirit | Story | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wonder | God | Think | Thought |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.

Honor | Ideas | Life | Life | Society | Society |

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

Ideas | Ignorance | World |

Ellen Goodman

Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

Famous | Ideas |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

In heaven there are two distinct loves, love to the Lord and love towards the neighbor, in the inmost or third heaven love to the Lord, in the second or middle heaven love towards the neighbor.

Destroy | Reality | Will |

Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

This instinct for totality, the counterpart of the feeling, gnawing and rankling, of dissatisfaction, is the germ of all religion. But man answers the craving need of a totality and a prospect into the future according to his historical conditions. Therefore all religions are genuine rings. None of them is a counterfeit, and none of them owns exclusively the truth and the whole truth.

Intention | Man | Means | Music | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Value |

Emil M. Cioran

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

History | Ideas |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

First of all it must be known who the God of heaven is, since upon that all the other things depend.

Good | Love | Reality | Thought | Will | Thought |

Emil M. Cioran

A phantom cannot be cured, still less an enlightened mind. We can only cure those who belong to the earth and still have their roots in it, however superficial.

Ideas | People | Theories |

Emil M. Cioran

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Absence | Death | Nothing | Reality |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

I know he has a bad nature,' said Catherine; 'he's your son. But I'm glad I've a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me and for that reason I love him. Mr Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldn't be you!

Ideas | Law | Plan | Waiting |

Emma Goldman

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

Ideas | Passion | Qualities | Revolution |

Emma Goldman

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

Evolution | Future | Hypocrisy | Ideas | Important | Lesson | Past | Psychology | Time |

Emma Goldman

Sure, nothing succeeds like success. Fact is, dearest, we are fools. We cling to an ideal no one wants or cares about. I am the greater fool of the two of us. I go on eating out my heart and poisoning every moment of my life in the attempt to rouse people's sensibilities. At least if I could do it with closed eyes. The irony is I see the futility of my efforts and yet I can't let go.

Determination | Reality | Will |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

But anarchy is not disorder as opposed to order, as the eclipse of themes is not, as js said, a return to a diffuse 'field of consciousness' prior to attention. Disorder is but another order, and what is diffuse is thematizable. Anarchy troubles being over and beyond these alternatives.

Existence | Life | Life | Meaning | Model | Order | Reality |

Emma Goldman

Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Change | Ideas | Means | Rest | Time |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are driven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness.

Phenomena | Reality | World |

Emma Goldman

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.

Ideas | Mind | Taste |