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

Thomas Jefferson

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Absolute | Age | Care | Commerce | Creed | Error | Freedom | Government | Justice | Labor | Peace | People | Principles | Public | Revolution | Right | Sacred | Safe | War | Will | Wisdom | Friendship | Government | Trial | Commerce | Parent | Understand |

Thomas Jefferson

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

Character | Government | Men | Mind | Patriotism | Progress | Public | Will | Wisdom | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

The best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of the first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful.

Beginning | Wisdom |

Thomas Jefferson

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

Confidence | Public | Wisdom |

Thomas Jefferson

?Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see.

Age | Experience | Government | Men | Present | Reverence | Sacred | Wisdom | Worth | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life [expectancy] of the majority.

Good | Wisdom |

Thomas Jefferson

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.

Balance | Business | Contrast | Eternal | Government | Hope | Ignorance | Liberty | Nations | Peace | Safe | Teach | War | Will | Wisdom | Government | Business |

Thomas Merton

Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.

Action | Intuition | Opposition | Rest | Society | Truth | Wisdom | Work | Society |

Thomas Merton

It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Man | Meaning | Order | Science | Wisdom | World |

Thomas Merton

If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now…What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear.

Fear | God | Inevitable | Reality | Will | Wisdom | Work | God |

Thomas Merton

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.

Skill | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |

Thomas Merton

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

Desire | Dreams | Light | Nothing | People | Waiting | Wisdom | Wise | World |

Thomas Paine

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods.

God | Power | Study | Wisdom | God |

Thomas Merton

The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done

Capacity | Cooperation | Life | Life | Surrender | Wisdom | Work |

Thomas Paine

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Care | God | Government | Little | Man | Method | Opinion | People | Superstition | Will | Wisdom | Government | God |

Thomas Paine

The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less.

Art | Church | Contemplation | Devotion | Discovery | Evidence | Life | Life | Order | Power | Principles | Science | Study | System | Wisdom | Work | Discovery | Art | Contemplation |

Thomas Merton

There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it.

Life | Life | Surrender | Wisdom | Work |

Thomas Merton

To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.

Capacity | Surrender | Wisdom | Work |

Thomas Merton

You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them. And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall being to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth. Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it. But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you.

Good | Ideas | Providence | Reason | Wisdom | Work |

Union Prayer Book NULL

Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of light and darkness, who make peace and fashions all things. In mercy, You illuminate the world and those who live upon it. In Your goodness You daily renew creation. How numerous are You works, Adonai! In wisdom, You formed them all, filling the earth with Your creatures. Be praised, Adonai our God, for the excellent work of your hands, And for the lights You created; may they glorify You. Shine a new light upon Zion, that we may swiftly merit its radiance. Praised are You Adonai, Creator of heavenly lights.

Angels | Compassion | Dread | Earth | God | Honor | Light | Peace | People | Reverence | Solitude | Universe | Wisdom | Work | God | Blessed |