Great Throughts Treasury

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

William Warburton

English Anglican Bishop of Gloucester

"Admiration is one of the most bewitching, enthusiastic passions of the mind; and every common moralist knows that it arises from novelty and surprise, the inseparable attendants of imposture."

"Of all exercises there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom."

"Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."

"High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any; one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of."

"Short, isolated sentences were the mode in which ancient wisdom delighted to convey its precepts for the regulation of human conduct."

"Enthusiasm is that temper of mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."

"A lie has no legs, and cannot stand; but it has wings, and can fly far and wide."

"Persecution for opinions stuck the fastest, and, after having tarnished the splendor of almost every Protestant community in its turn, was the latest, and with most difficulty, shaken off."

"Reason is the test of ridicule,?not ridicule the test of truth."

"Self-interest,? spurring to action by hopes and fears, caused all those disorders amongst men which required the remedy of civil society."

"Shakespeare, in As You Like It, has rallied the mode of formal dueling, then so prevalent, with the highest humor and address."

"Short isolated sentences were the mode in which ancient wisdom delighted to convey its precepts for the regulation of human conduct."

"Of all literary exercitations, whether designed for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom."

"The doctrine of a metempsychosis the Greek writers agree to have been first set abroad by the Egyptians."

"The Egyptians, by the concurrent testimony of antiquity, were amongst the first who taught that the soul was immortal."

"The Egyptians, whose sages were not sedentary scholastic sophists, like the Grecian, but men employed and busied in the public affairs of religion and government."

"The glare of puerile declamation that tinsels over the trite essays of the other."

"The life of Tully and the Divine Legation will be a rule how men who esteem the love of each other should comfort themselves when they differ in opinion."

"The protection of religion is indispensable to all governments."

"The skillful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles."