Great Throughts Treasury

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

Parents

"However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home." - Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah

"I don't want to imply that it's uniquely American that people growing up have to come to terms with their independence and their separation to some extent from parents and from teachers. That's normal in any culture. It's that our culture pushes, emphasizes, and intensifies it beyond, I think, virtually any culture I know about." - Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah

"Of all hands in the world, it was not the hand that I wanted or dreamed of touching, ... We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians - we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough. ...The time for peace has come." - Yitzhak Shamir, born Icchak Jaziernicki

"Some children act as if they thought their parents had nothing to do, but to see them established in the world and then quit it." -

"If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

"Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it." - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

"In America nothing dies easier than tradition." - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

"You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart." - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

"CLOSED ON SUNDAY I was not so committed to financial success that I was willing to abandon my principles and priorities. One of the most visible examples of this is our decision to close on Sunday. Our decision to close on Sunday was our way of honoring God and of directing our attention to things that mattered more than our business." - S. Truett Cathy

"I believe no amount of business school training or work experience can teach what is ultimately a matter of personal character. Businesses are not dishonest or greedy, people are. Thus, a business, successful or not, is merely a reflection of the character of its leadership." - S. Truett Cathy

"I would not believe in the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so" - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain." - Saint Paul, aka The Apostle Paul, Paul the Apostle or Saul of Tarsus NULL

"I used unexpectedly to experience a consciousness of the presence of God, or such a kind that I could not possibly doubt that He was within me or that I was wholly engulfed in Him. This was in no sense a vision: I believe it is called mystical theology. The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself. The will loves; the memory, I think, is almost lost; while the understanding, I believe, thought it is not lost, does not reason—I mean that it does not work, but is amazed at the extent of all it can understand; for God wills it to realize that it understands nothing of what His Majesty represents to it." - Saint Teresa of Ávila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL

"If this is the way you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few! [said to God]" - Saint Teresa of Ávila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL

"Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

"To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it." - Samuel Butler

"The corner-stone of national defense is justice in fundamental relations of life -- economic justice." - Samuel Gompers

"In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Sorrow makes an ugly face odious." - Samuel Richardson

"The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician." - Sydney J. Harris

"A child sucking at his mother's breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it; and, furthermore, introducing object loss as an unavoidable step in the path to mental evolution, that it is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as "right" in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as "brute force."" - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."" - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"I have heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"My first glance is always at a woman's sleeve. In a man it is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Is God a being less to be regarded than man, and more worthy of contempt than a creature? It would be strange if a benefactor should live in the same town, in the same house, with us, and we never exchange a word with him; yet this is our case, who have the works of God in our eyes, the goodness of God in our being, the mercy of God in our daily food, yet think so little of him, converse so little with him, serve everything before him, and prefer everything above him. Whence have we our mercies but from his hand? Who, besides him, maintains our breath at this moment? Would he call for our spirits this moment, they must depart from us to attend his command. There is not a moment wherein our unworthy carriage is not aggravated, because there is not a moment wherein he is not our guardian and gives us not tastes of a fresh bounty." - Stephen Charnock

"Without faith we are not fit to desire mercy, without humility we are not fit to receive it, without affection we are not fit to value it, without sincerity we are not fit to improve it. Times of extremity contribute to the growth and exercise of these qualifications." - Stephen Charnock

"Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it." - Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey

"People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"The thing that impressed me then as now about New York ... was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant.... The strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak — and so very, very many." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"If you love someone but rarely make yourself available to him or her; that is not true love." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The clan of "I will do it" was overtaken without having done it. - Kenya Proverb" -

"I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The passions are the winds that fill the sails of the vessel. - They sink it at times; but without them it would be impossible to make way. - Many things that are dangerous here below, are still necessary." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals." - Virginia Satir

"It is easy to see how adolescence becomes so frustrating, and old age so abhorrent, to many people. The life line is disempowered at two major points: at the beginning and at the end. The only acceptable place is in the middle. Power is conferred only on adults. It is denied to youth and seniors." - Virginia Satir

"Just as a sailor's fate depends on knowing that the bulk of the iceberg is under the water, so a family's fate depends on understanding the feelings and needs that lie beneath everyday family events." - Virginia Satir

"For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"If I have caused just one person to wipe away a tear of laughter, that's my reward... The rest goes to the government!" - Victor Borge, born Børge Rosenbaum

"Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year." - Victor Borge, born Børge Rosenbaum

"It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish." - Vance Havner

"I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman