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

Alan Cohen

Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre.

Despair | Friend | God | Greatness | Life | Life | Patience | People | Popularity | Quiet | Simplicity | Turmoil | Wealth | Words | World | God |

Albert Camus

There can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Love |

Alan Cohen

It is time for you to understand the purpose of your life. You are a chalice for God’s Love and a vehicle for Him to bless the world. Realize your Divine purpose and your will is aligned with His. Goodness is the theme of all life. See the Perfection in your life and you recapture your Childhood Vision. As you give up patterns of evaluation and cynicism, you accept the benevolence of God. Pain is born of resistance, and joy is a function of the acceptance of God’s whole and Holy Love for you. Find purpose in your joy, and you find purpose in God.

Acceptance | Benevolence | Childhood | Cynicism | God | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Vision | Will | World | Understand |

Alfred North Whitehead

Goodness must be denied a place among the aims of art. For Goodness is a qualification belonging to the constitution of reality, which in any of its individual actualizations is better or worse. Good and evil lie in depths and distances below and beyond appearance. They solely concern inter-relations within the real world. The real world is good when it is beautiful. Art has essentially to do with perfections attainable by purposeful adaptation of appearance.

Aims | Appearance | Art | Better | Evil | Good | Individual | Reality | World | Art |

Aristotle NULL

Those who desire honor from good men, and men who know, are aiming at confirming their own opinion of themselves; they delight in honor, therefore, because they believe in their own goodness on the strength of the judgment of those who speak about them.

Desire | Good | Honor | Judgment | Men | Opinion | Strength |

Aristotle NULL

Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately... They have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one’s life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward... They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon’s precept by overdoing everything; they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.

Day | Deeds | Expectation | Future | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Men | Nothing | Past | Precept | Usefulness | Youth | Deeds | Youth | Expectation | Friends | Think | Value |

Author Unknown NULL

Everyone can put to good use their own little bits of time, talent, influence, ambition, energy, and weave them into lives of beauty and goodness and rare value.

Ambition | Beauty | Energy | Good | Influence | Little | Time | Beauty |

C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love of goodness or joy worth having.

Evil | Free will | Joy | Love | Will | Worth |

Elbert Green Hubbard

Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one.

Reason |

Hannah More

How goodness heightens beauty!

Beauty |

Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner

Duty and genuine goodness are mutually exclusive… The sense of “ought” shows me the Good at an infinite impassable distance from my will. Willing obedience is never the fruit of an “ought’ but only of love.

Duty | Good | Love | Obedience | Sense | Will |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never ran instant’s truce between virtue an vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Life | Life | Virtue | Virtue |