Great Throughts Treasury

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

Distinction

"What do I believe? In the private life... In holding up culture... In music, Shakespeare, old buildings... What do I enjoy? Music... Being in love... Children... Sleeping... Meat... My faults: Never on time... Lying, talking too much... Laziness... No volition for refusal..." - Susan Sontag

"It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?" - William Blake

"Well I wish he could have read a so-called humorist's mail. Never did I have so much approving mail on one article, and not a half dozen dissenting ones, and they were from lawyers. Every layman approved. It batted about 98 per cent." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The verdict of the judges was biased by nothing else than their habitudes of feeling." - Walter Savage Landor

"To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want." - Wendell Berry

"Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The balanced persons will be active because it is their duty. They will not be agitated by anything - failure or success. The Godly will take up activity as a means of worshipping God; and they leave the result to God. They know that they are but instruments in the hands of God." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience." - Tryon Edwards

"Camila was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one]." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours." - William James

"Our hearts deceive us, because we leave them to themselves, are absent from them, taken up in outward rules and forms of living and praying. But this kind of praying, which takes all its thoughts and words only from the state of our hearts, makes it impossible for us to be strangers to ourselves. The strength of every sin, the power of every evil temper, the most secret workings of our hearts, the weakness of any or all our virtues, is with a noonday clearness forced to be seen, as soon as the heart is made our prayer book, and we pray nothing, but according to what we read, and find there." - William Law

"I know a little garden close Set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wander if I might from dewy dawn to dewy night. And have one with me wandering." - William Morris

"And wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"I, wretched creature finally had to lower my flag, after a long struggle until dark with gloom and loneliness." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"So he'll never know how much love: not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself, than I own. I do not know that our souls are made, but they are equal, and Linton is as different from mine as a moonbeam is different from lightning, fire or ice." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"The insights of wisdomÂ… enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual. Such a life necessarily sets man against man and national against nation, because man's needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"I distinguish three sorts of signs: 1. Accidental signs, or the objects which particular circumstances have connected with some of our ideas, so as to render the one proper to revive the other. 2. Natural signs, or the cries which nature has established to express the passions of joy, of fear, or of grief, 3. Instituted signs, or those which we have chosen ourselves, and bear only an arbitrary relation to our ideas." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh