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

Sara Davidson

The ability to laugh at life is right at the top, with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humor has much to do with pain; it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel, so that we gain distance and through laughter, relief.

Ability | Character | Humor | Laughter | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Right | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us - the ties that have made others depend on us - and would cut them in two.

Character | Feelings | Life | Life | Right | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

Character | Duty | Freedom | Right | Search | Teach | Truth | Understand |

Karlfried Graf Von Dürckheim, fully Karl Friedrich Alfred Heinrich Ferdinand Maria Graf Eckbrecht von Dürckheim-Montmartin

“What” we do belongs to the world. In the “how,” the way we do it, we infallibly revel to ourselves whether our attitude is in harmony with the inner law or in contradiction to it, in accordance with our right form or opposed to it, open to Divine Being or closed to it. What is our right “form”? It is none other than that in which we are transparent to Divine Being. And to be transparent means that we are able to experience Divine Being in our selves and to reveal it in the world.

Character | Contradiction | Experience | Harmony | Law | Means | Right | World |

Tyron Edwards

True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us.

Character | God | Humility | Right | Self | Spirit | God |

Euripedes NULL

Many are the natures of men, various their manners of living, yet a straight path is always the right one; and lessons deeply taught lead man to paths of righteousness; reverence, I say, is wisdom and by its grace transfigures - so that we seek virtue with a right judgment. From all of this springs honor bringing ageless glory into Man’s life. Oh, a mighty quest is the hunting out of virtue.

Character | Glory | Grace | Honor | Judgment | Life | Life | Man | Manners | Men | Reverence | Right | Righteousness | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler

Some people gauge their value by what they own. But in reality the entire concept of ownership of possessions is based on an illusion. When you obtain a material object, it does not become part of you. Ownership is merely your right to use specific objects whenever you wish and that no one has a right to take them away from you. How unfortunate is the person who has an ambition to cleave to something impossible to cleave to. Such a person will not obtain what he desires and will experience suffering.

Ambition | Character | Experience | Illusion | Object | People | Possessions | Reality | Right | Suffering | Will | Ambition | Value |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking; always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.

Character | Day | Duty | Right | Thinking |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The simplest explanation is not always the right one, truth is very often not simple.

Character | Right | Truth |

Henry Ford

We now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right; there can be no conflict between good economics and good morals.

Character | Economics | Good | Right | Wisdom |

Alfred George Gardiner

The man who is consumed by hate is not only a misery to himself, but a source of misery to all around him, not because of the menace he offers to our interests but because he defiles the atmosphere we breathe and debases the currency of our kind.

Character | Hate | Man |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who seizes on the moment, he is the right man.

Character | Man | Right |

Henry Fielding

As a great part of the uneasiness of matrimony arises from mere trifles, it would be wise in every young married man to enter into an agreement with his wife, that in all disputes of this kind the party who was most convinced they were right should always surrender the victory. By which means both would be more forward to give up the cause.

Cause | Character | Man | Matrimony | Means | Right | Surrender | Trifles | Wife | Wise |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

What we give out as scientific truth is only the product of our own needs and desires, as they are formulated under varying external conditions; that is to say, it is illusion once more. Ultimately we find only what we need to find, and see only what we desire to see. We can do nothing else. And since the criterion of truth, correspondence with an external world, disappears, it is absolutely immaterial what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a right to accuse any one else of error.

Character | Desire | Error | Illusion | Need | Nothing | Right | Truth | World |

Henry George

Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.

Action | Character | Right | Thought | Will | Wisdom |

Henry Fielding

Contempt of others is the truest symptom of a base and bad heart, while it suggests itself to the mean and the vile, and tickles their little fancy on every occasion, it never enters the great and good mind but on the strongest motives; nor is it then a welcome guest - affording only an uneasy sensation, and bringing always with it a mixture of concern and compassion.

Character | Compassion | Contempt | Good | Heart | Little | Mind | Motives |

Robert Hall

All attempts to urge men forward, even in the right path, beyond the measure of their light, are impracticable; and unlawful, if they were practicable; augment their light, conciliate their affections, and they will follow of their own accord.

Character | Light | Men | Right | Will |

Robert Hall

Corrupt as men are, they are yet so much the creatures of reflection, and so strongly addicted to sentiments of right and wrong, that their attachment to a public cause can rarely be secured, or their animosity be kept alive, unless their understandings are engaged by some appearance of truth and rectitude.

Appearance | Cause | Character | Men | Public | Reflection | Right | Truth | Wrong |

Joseph Jones "J.J." Reynolds

Remember that when you're in the right you can afford to keep your temper and that when you're in the wrong you can't afford to lose it.

Character | Right | Temper | Wrong |