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

Eric S. Raymond

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Machines |

Erik Johannson

I have been doing the photography all my life but I’ve only been doing the manipulations for about four or five years. What takes most time in the production process is the planning. With good planning the other steps don’t take so long. If I have a good idea I will add it to my list of projects that I want to realise. The photography, for me, is a way to get material because my work is created on a computer afterwards. From the idea to the final image, it can take between a week and a month.

Hope | Ideas | Influence | Will |

Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan

Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.

Hope | Pardon | Struggle |

Ernest Becker

We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffer­ing and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.

Comfort | Despair | Destroy | Doubt | Dread | Failure | Ideas | Joy | Life | Life | Little | Man | Reality | Self-knowledge | Sense | Failure |

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings, "how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?" "For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."

Awareness | Body | Death | Dreams | Fate | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Order | Will | World | Fate | Awareness |

Ernest Becker

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

Death | Defiance | Excitement |

Ernest Becker

We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.

Belief | Children | Meaning | Power | Reason | Wonder | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

Beginning | Will |

Ernest Becker

What we will see is that man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesnÂ’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small mangable pieces as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call character defenses

Enough | Illusion | Justify |

Ernest Becker

Civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

Man | Normality | People | Reality | Time | Wants | Vice |

Ernest Becker

Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with atowering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Fear | Will |

Ernest Becker

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

Ernest Becker

Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

Awareness | Comfort | Culture | Dedication | Evolution | Fury | Giving | Hope | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Society | Time | Society | Awareness | Understand |

Ernest Becker

The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Balance | Illusion | Immortality | Man | People | Truth | World | Trouble |

Ernest Becker

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.

Guilt | Knowledge | Right | Story | Writing |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends. 'The fish is my friend too,' he said aloud. 'I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

Good | Little | Man | Men | People | Sound | Talking | Time | Waiting |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Say, there's plenty of Americans on this train. They've got seven cars of them from Dayton, Ohio.

Absolute | Appearance | Danger | Death | Little | Order | Purity | Danger | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war and a real peasant leader might be a little too much like Pablo. You couldn't wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manifacture one. At that, from what he had seen of Campesino, with his black beard, his thick negroid lips, and his feverish, staring eyes, he thought he might give almost as much trouble as a real peasant leader. The last time he had seen him he seemed to have gotten to believe his own publicity and think he was a peasant.

Absolute | Brotherhood | Consecration | Death | Duty | Experience | Light | Necessity | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Talking | Think |