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

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

When we exaggerate the tenderness of our friends towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own merit.

Desire | Gratitude | People | Sense | Friends |

William Shakespeare

O thou who dost inhabit in my breast; Leave not the mansion so long tenantless; Lest growing ruinous the building fall, And leave no memory of what it was.

Art | Sense | Art |

William Shakespeare

O God that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away they brains ! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!

God | Sense | God |

William Shakespeare

PANDARUS: Well, well! Why, have you any discretion? Have you any eyes? Do you know what a man is? Is not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man? CRESSIDA: Ay, a minc'd man; and then to be bak'd with no date in the pie, for then the man's date is out.

Grief | Sense |

William Shakespeare

Or I shall live your epitaph to make, or you survive when I in earth am rotten; from hence your memory death cannot take, although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, though I, once gone, to all the world must die:

Sense |

Edwin Percy Whipple

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment

Common Sense | Object | Sense | Old | Vice |

Edward Scribner Ames

It may be said that the supreme revelation is to be found in Jesus Christ and that all the rest of the Bible leads up to him. Yet there are two ways of accepting the words and example of Jesus. One is to take what he says as true because he says it, and another is to believe it because it stands the test of reflection and experience. When his way of life has been confirmed by the demands of intelligence and of practical life, it has gained the deepest security and made its strongest claims upon our loyalty.

Association | Change | Divinity | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | People | Psychology | Sense | Sin | Strength | Association |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties. - Hope is bom in the long night of watching and tears. - Faith visits us in defeat and disappointment, amid the consciousness of earthly frailty and the crumbling tombstones of mortality.

Public | Sense |

Edward Scribner Ames

We have overdeveloped the individualism that arose in a pioneer country. We are destined to become more co-operative, more collectivistic, and to find in this direction still greater opportunity for the individual, not so much restricted and defeated by competition but enlarged and enhanced by the support of a common will. It may be that the problem of material goods--of the necessary but yet external goods of food, clothing, shelter, and money-is about to be solved through new discoveries and developments, with the energies of men left freer than they have ever been to cultivate on higher levels the sharable goods of life, such as love and wisdom. These values grow with use and multiply by being freely shared.

Business | Church | Defiance | God | Isolation | Knowledge | Organic | Sense | Society | Society | Business | God | Old |

Sei Shōnagon

Even on this festive day, when all are seeking butterflies and flowers, you and you alone can see what feelings hide within my heart.

Absurd | Sense | Sound | Will |

Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the people of Tibet will be scattered like ants across the world and the dharma will come to the land of the red man.

Age | Lying | People | Sense |

Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

Absolute | Sense | Truth |

Egyptian Proverbs

Man proposes, God disposes.

Responsibility | Sense | Will | Learn |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family life

Faith | Sense |

Egyptian Proverbs

When the angels appear, the devils run away.

People | Sense |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

Down there, between the dreary trunks of the beeches, houses lay like a sediment in the cup of the misty valley: great gabled carcasses, villas aping the manor, belfried garages where you could feel the cars get cold.

Sense |

Elif Safak

No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed.

Change | Childhood | Life | Life | Religion | Sense | Time | Truth | Understanding | Woman | World |

Elihu Root

Cruelty to men and to the lower animals as well, which would have passed unnoticed a century ago, now shocks the sensibilities and is regarded as wicked and degrading.

Circumstances | Justice | Right | Sense |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

The straight sunny tombstones looked sociable, fresh wreaths were laid on the breasts of the graves. You could almost see the dead sitting up holding their flowers, like invalids on a visiting-day, waiting to hear the music. Only the very new dead, under raw earth with no tombstones, lay flat in despair…

Degeneracy | Novels | Reading | Sense |

Elif Safak

No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to various cities, commuters between cultures, both from here and everywhere.

Little | Sense | World | Afraid |