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

Christian Nestell Bovee

We may learn from children how large a part of our grievances is imaginary. But the pain is just as real.

Children | Pain | Wisdom | Learn |

Samuel Butler

Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organized beings are.

Ideas | Mortal | Pain | Peril | Wisdom |

Raymond Dart, fully Raymond Arthur Dart

The personal issue is whether the things we are doing day by day are done in a conscious and balanced way or are part of a pain ridden struggle. If yours be the latter method, stop!

Day | Method | Pain | Struggle | Wisdom |

Thomas Dekker

To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day with reverence for the opportunities it contains; to approach my work with a clean mind; to hold ever before me, even in the doing of little things, the Ultimate Purpose toward which I am working; to meet men and women with laughter on my lips and love in my heart; to be gentle, kind and courteous through all the hours; to approach the night with weariness that ever woos sleep and the joy that goes with work well done - this is how I desire to waste wisely my days.

Day | Desire | Heart | Joy | Laughter | Little | Love | Men | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Reverence | Smile | Waste | Wisdom | Work |

Albert Einstein

O Youth: Do you know that yours is not the first generation to yearn for a life of beauty and freedom? Do you know that all your ancestors felt as you do - and fell victim to trouble and hatred? Do you know, also, that your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment if you succeed in attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain? Open your eyes, your heart, your hands, and avoid the poison your forebears so greedily sucked in from History. Then will all the earth be your fatherland, and all your work and effort spread forth blessings.

Beauty | Blessings | Earth | Effort | Freedom | Fulfillment | Heart | History | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Men | Pain | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Wishes | Work | Youth | Trouble | Beauty | Victim |

Albert Einstein

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked By the laughter of the gods.

Knowledge | Laughter | Truth | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with true greatness, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.

Good | Greatness | Pain | Rest | Wisdom | World | Happiness |

David Garrick

Fun gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no.

Fun | Laughter | Will | Wisdom |

William Harvey

Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labors under the effects of vitiated nutrition and want of native heat.

Agitation | Body | Cause | Change | Circumstances | Disease | Fear | Heart | Hope | Influence | Mind | Pain | Pleasure | Rest | Wisdom | Wonder |

Victor Hugo

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, that shows at the same time pearls and the soul.

Heart | Laughter | Soul | Time | Wisdom |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness; and laughter is on top of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

Despair | God | Laughter | Madness | Mirth | Reason | Sorrow | Tears | Wisdom |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

The mind may undoubtedly affect the body; but the body also affects the mind. There is a reaction between them; and by lessening it on either side, you diminish the pain on both.

Body | Mind | Pain | Wisdom |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

Did you ever observe that immoderate laughter always ends in a sigh?

Ends | Laughter | Wisdom |

Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?

Pain | Riches | Sorrow | Suffering | Wisdom | Loss | Trouble |

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions.

Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Soul | Wavering | Wisdom |

D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another... Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom... The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences... the world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeonhole any idea. It can't pigeon-hole a new experience.

Experience | Fear | Freedom | Genius | Laughter | Man | Men | Wisdom | World | Old |

Francis "Frank" William Leahy

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.

Pain | Stupidity | Wisdom |