Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Day

"Neither dread your last day nor desire it." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL

"Of no day can the retrospect cause pain to a good man, nor has one passed away which he is unwilling to remember: the period of his life seems prolonged by his good acts; and we may be said to live twice, when we can reflect with pleasure on the days that are gone." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL

"To-morrow I will live, the fool does say; to-day itself's too late; the wise man lived yesterday." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL

"To-morrow life is too late: live to-day." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL

"A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog

"A true philosopher makes death his common practice, while he lives, and every day by contemplation strives to separate the soul, far as he can, from off the body." - Samuel Joseph May

"Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo of the invisible world, one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound." - Guiseppe Mazzini

"Be willing to pity the misery of the stranger! Thou givest to-day thy bread to the poor; to-morrow the poor may give it to thee." - Johann Benjamin Michaelis

"Yet it is meet and proper that a nation should set apart an annual day for national giving of thanks. It is a public recognition of God as the Author of all prosperity. It is the erection of a memorial to the honor of him who has led us through another year. The annual proclamations which call to the duty of thanksgiving are calculated to remind the people of their indebtedness to God, to stir in their minds and hearts emotions of gratitude and praise, and to call out thanks and sincere worship which otherwise might not find expression. But if the observance of the day be not marked by real remembering of mercies and by real lifting of hearts to God in thanks, what blessing can possibly come with it?" -

"The Day of Atonement atones for sins against God, not for sins against man, unless the injured man has been appeased." -

"Life is aimless: a little love, a little hate, and then - good day! Life is short: a little hope; a little dreaming, and then - goodnight!" - Leon Montenaeken, fully Louis Moreau Constant Corneille van Montenaeken

"Read ever day something no one else is reading. Think something no one else is thinking. It is bad for the mind to be always a part of unanimity." - Christopher Morley, fully Christopher Darlington Morley

"I believe the recipe for happiness to be just enough money to pay the monthly bills you acquire, a little surplus to give you confidence, a little too much work each day, enthusiasm for your work, a substantial share of good health, a couple of real friends, and a wife and children to share life's beauty with you." - John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley

"Modern technology has lost its magic. No longer do people stand in awe, thrilled by the onward rush of science, the promise of a new day. Instead, the new is suspect. It arouses our hostility as much as it used to excite our fancy. With each breakthrough there are recurrent fears and suspicion. How will the advance further pollute our lives; modern technology is not merely what it first appears to be. Behind the whitecoats, the disarming jargon, the elaborate instrumentation, and a the core of what has often seemed an automatic process, one finds what Dorothy found in Oz: modern technology is human after all." - David Franklin Noble

"The divisions and boundaries that we perceive based upon our five senses are, in effect, an illusion. It’s my belief that the meaning of life changes from day to day, second to second. I believe we’re here to learn that we’re part of a creative force - I would go so far as to call that force divine. We’re here to learn that we can create a world and that we have a choice in what we create, and that our world, if we choose, can be a heaven or hell." - Thomas E. O’Connor

"Reverence the highest; have patience with the lowest. Let this day’s performance of the meanest duty be thy religion." -

"A world of little cares is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows nothing of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the postponable wants; and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin." - Thomas Paine

"Old age brings us to know the value of the blessings which we have enjoyed, and it brings us also to a very thankful perception of those which yet remain. Is a man advanced in life? The ease of a single day, the rest of a single night, are gifts which may be subjects of gratitude to God." - William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa

"Nature is man’s religious book, with lessons for every day." - Joseph Parker

"The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected, if day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, our soul exists in space inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity." - Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak

"Life is an adventure in experience, and when you are no longer greedy for the last drop of it, it means no more than that you have set your face... to the day when you shall depart." - Donald Culross Peattie

"Night steals on; and the day takes its farewell, like the words of a departing friend, or the last tone of hallowed music in a minister’s aisles, heard when it floats along the shade of elms; in the still place of graves." - Margaret Percival

"Unhappy he who does his work adjourn, and to to-morrow would the search delay: his lazy morrow ill be like to-day." - Persius, fully Aulus Persius Flaccus NULL

"In my life of professional teaching, I have never endeavored to make young men more efficient; I have tried to make them more interesting. If one is interested, one is usually interesting. The business of a teacher is not to supply information, it is to raise a thirst. I like to hang pictures on the walls of the mind, I like to make it possible for a man to live with himself, so that he will not be bored with himself. For my own part, I live everyday as if this were the first day I had ever seen and the last I were going to see." - William Lyon Phelps

"The time we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up the rest." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Each day is the scholar of yesterday." - Publius Syrus

"One to-day is worth two to-morrows." - Francis Quarles

"Look upon every day as the whole of life, not merely as a section; and enjoy and improve the present without wishing, through haste, to rush on to another." -

"Men’s feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell; like the glaciers, which are transparent and rosy-hued only at sunrise and sunset, but through the day gray and cold." -

"Every dogma has its day." - Abraham Rotstein

"There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Reveal not every secret you have to a friend, for how can you tell but that friend may hereafter become an enemy. And bring not all the mischief you are able to do upon an enemy, for he may one day become your friend." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"It is impossible for any woman to love her children twenty-four hours a day." - Milton R. Sapirstein

"It is only through the morning gate of the beautiful that you can penetrate into the realm of knowledge. That which we feel here as beauty we shall one day know as truth." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"We are all salesmen every day of our lives. We are selling our ideas, our plans, our enthusiasms to those with whom we come in contact." - Charles Michael Schwab

"A day differs not a whit from eternity." -

"If you are possessed by so great a craving for life, reflect that the things which vanish from our gaze... are not annihilated: they merely end their course and do not perish. And death, which we far and shrink from, merely interrupts life but does not take it away. The day will return when we shall be restored to the light. Many would object to this, but they are returned without memory. I mean to show you later that everything which seems to perish merely changes. Since you are destined to return, depart with a tranquil mind." -

"One should count each day a separate life." -

"The security of nations is like happiness in love; a happy miracle which it is necessary to create anew every day." - Count Carlo Sforza

"Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to-day as when they first passed through their author’s mind, ages ago." - Samuel Smiles

"We each day dig our graves with our teeth." - Samuel Smiles

"We know nothing of to-morrow; our business is to be good and happy to-day." - Sydney Smith

"We believe in a life continuum, and eternal life. Each incarnation or lifetime on earth is 'just a day in the classroom'... We believe the plane of greatest learning is the physical plane. It is up to all of us to make the most of each carnation. We believe that all there is in the universe is energy... and all energy forms, from subatomic particles to stars, are in a constant state of change and transformation... that interpreting energy frequencies on sensory bands creates the reality in which each life-form lives." - Richard and Greta Smolowe

"Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men... Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched." - Charles P. Steinmetz, fully Charles Proteus Steinmetz, born Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz

"With all its alluring promise that some one else will guarantee for a rainy day, social security can never replace the program that man's future welfare, is after all, a matter of individual responsibility." - Harold J. Stonier

"The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type at all times, was not the hustler, but the whittler." -

"In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their separateness, but the day reveals the unity which embraces them. And the man whose inner vision is bathed in consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity which reigns over all racial differences, and his mind no longer stumbles over individual facts, accepting them as final. He realizes that peace is an inner harmony and not an outer adjustment, that beauty carries the assurance of our relationship to reality, which waits for its perfection in the response of our love." -

"A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his care." - Jeremy Taylor