Great Throughts Treasury

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

Sorrow

"Wise men say that the root of victory is consultation and discussion with learned and wise men. ." - Valmiki NULL

"A scholar should gather up spirit and energy in single-mindedness. If your quest for virtue is for reasons of fame and fortune, you will never amount to anything. If in scholarly endeavors you indulge in fashionable verse and stylistic flourishes, you cannot attain depth and stability of mind." - Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming

"There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"A good heart is the sun and moon, or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps its course truly. King Henry V, Act v, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"And thus I clothe my naked villany with old odd ends, stol'n out of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Gloucester at I, iii)" - William Shakespeare

"Ay, to the proof, as mountains are for winds, that shakes not, though they blow perpetually." - William Shakespeare

"Be stirring as the time, be fire with fire, threaten the threatener, and outface the brow of bragging horror; so shall inferior eyes, that borrow their behaviors from the great, grow great by your example and put on the dauntless spirit of resolution. The Life and Death of King John (Bastard at V, i)" - William Shakespeare

"But come, I'll tell thee all my whole device When I am in my coach, which stays for us At the park gate; and therefore haste away, For we must measure twenty miles to-day. The Merchant of Venice (Portia at III, iv)" - William Shakespeare

"DON PEDRO: To be merry best becomes you; for, out o' question, you were born in a merry hour. BEATRICE: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under than was I born. Much Ado about Nothing, Act ii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"With what a heavy and retarding weight does expectation load the wing of time." - William Mason

"I have never been in doubt since I was old enough to think intelligently that I would someday be made President." - William McKinley

"Late February days; and now, at last, might you have thought that Winter's woe was past; so fair the sky was and so soft the air." - William Morris

"O thrush, your song is passing sweet but never a song that you have sung,is half so sweet as thrushes sang when my dear Love and I were young." - William Morris

"Of France and England, did this king succeed; whose state so many had the managing. That they lost France and made his England bleed." - William Shakespeare

"Once, he kissed me. I loved my lips the better ten days after: would he would do so every day!" - William Shakespeare

"One that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning." - William Shakespeare

"Patience is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts." - William Shakespeare

"Let us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. - Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. - The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the throne." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki

"Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?" - William Shakespeare

"So smooth he daubed his vice with show of virtue that, his apparent open guilt omitted-- I mean, his conversation with Shore's wife-- He lived from all attainder of suspects. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (King Richard at III, v)" - William Shakespeare

"As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Dreams of doing good for good-for-nothing people." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"All perfect things are saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, the matchless tinting on the royal rose whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked. Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows, these hold a deeper pathos than our woes, since they leave nothing better to expect." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?" - Emile Zola

"For the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root." - Emma Goldman

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies." - Emma Goldman

"It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time." - Eudora Welty

"Alas!-but why Alas? It is the lot of mortality we experience." - Euripedes NULL

"Give it a kick at the right place and it'll work." - Ezer Weizman

"The family is the school of duties... founded on love." - Felix Adler

"Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken