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

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

In a false man, thought is the king and the spirit is considered an enemy.

Light | Man |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

To change what you get you must change who you are

Light |

Victor Hugo

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Light |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

We learn to escape from self-defeating behavior in small ways at first. You can do this by thinking of present situations where you now say YES but wish you could stop. Recall several small situations. Perhaps you have agreed to meet regularly with a friend or relative but realize that it is really a burden. Maybe you agreed to take the leadership in a certain project but now you wish you had declined. You now know WHERE you must say NO. The next step is also clear. SAY NO. Make the necessary contact and resign. Just like that. Do it even if you feel nervous about it. Don’t listen to your timidity. Do what is right. Do you know what you are doing! You are getting your life back!

Defeat | Light |

Victor Hugo

A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference.

Heart | Light | Man | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

A weakness natural to superior and to little men, when they have committed a fault, is to wish to make it pass as a work of genius, a vast combination which the vulgar cannot comprehend. Pride says these things and folly credits them.

Character | Light |

Victor Hugo

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Beauty | Fraternity | Light | Beauty |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

One can never be the judge of another's grief. That which is a sorrow to one, to another is joy. Let us not dispute with any one concerning the reality of his sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries - each man has his own.

Change | Dawn | Doubt | Light | Looks | Men | Nations | Revolution | Thinking | Tomorrow | Will | World | Old |

Victor Hugo

All I know is that you love me...in my dreams.

Light |

Victor Hugo

A social deformity perhaps still more hideous than the evil rich: the evil poor

Law | Light | Skeptic |

Victor Hugo

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.

Force | Light | Truth |

Victor Hugo

Skepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Danger | Light | Will | Danger |

Victor Hugo

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

Cause | Earth | Fidelity | Indispensable | Life | Life | Light | Love | Need | Nothing | Reason | Thought | Time | Happiness | Think | Thought |

Victor Hugo

She had always been naked under the biting north wind of misfortune, and now it seemed to her she was clothed. Before her soul had been cold; now it was warm.

Light |

Victor Hugo

To live is to understand. To live is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall.

Light | Learn |

Victor Hugo

In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.

Life | Life | Light |

Victor Hugo

In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually.

Education | Happy | Humanity | Light |

Victor Hugo

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

Darkness | Growth | Light |

Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps - concentration camps, that is - and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

Dawn | Existence | Light | Protest | Question | Reason | Spirit | Time | Work |

Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

In between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Existence | Light | Protest | Question | Spirit |