Great Throughts Treasury

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

Related Quotes

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

There is not room for Death, nor atom that his might could render void: Thou - Thou art Being and Breath, and what Thou art may never be destroyed.

Acquaintance | Care | Feelings | Nothing | Wrong |

Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

We journey to the day, and tell each other how we sang to keep the dark away.

Age | Good | Kill | Men | Mistake | Truth |

Emmet Fox

Affirm your divine selfhood, look the world in the face and fear nothing.

God | Means | Mistake | Opportunity | Service | Truth | Will | God |

Emmet Fox

When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be.

Change | Conduct | Convictions | Day | Destiny | Experience | Feelings | Life | Life | Pious | Story | Think |

Erskine Mason

For we may ask in return, what has any secret purpose to do with our role of judgment and action? “Secret things,” we are told, “belong unto the Lord our God; but things which are revealed, unto us and to our children.” The question taken from the hidden purposes of the divine mind, can have no force whatever, because it is an appeal to our ignorance. We know, and can know nothing about them. One thing, however, we do know. God must be always and everywhere consistent with himself; and whether we can understand it or not, it is certain that there can be no inconsistency between revealed and unrevealed truths; and if God has made an offer of eternal life through the atonement unto all men, and commanded all men to embrace it, there cannot be in any purpose of God concerning its nature, anything which will clash with, and so contradict this universal offer.

Circumstances | Earth | God | Light | Means | Mistake | Nature | Necessity | Principles | System | Waste | Will | God | Guilty |

Evgeny Morozov

The Chinese government keeps installing video cameras in its most troubling cities. Not only do such cameras remind passersby about the panopticon they inhabit, they also supply the secret police with useful clues[...]. Such revolution in video surveillance did not happen without some involvement from Western partners. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, funded in part by the Chinese government, have managed to build surveillance software that can automatically annotate and comment on what it sees, generating text files that can later be searched by humans, obviating the need to watch hours of video footage in search of one particular frame. (To make that possible, the researchers had to recruit twenty graduates of local art colleges in China to annotate and classify a library of more than two million images.) Such automation systems help surveillance to achieve the much needed scale, for as long as the content produced by surveillance cameras can be indexed and searched, one can continue installing new surveillance cameras. [...] The face-recognition industry is so lucrative that even giants like Google can’t resist getting into the game, feeling the growing pressure from saller players like Face.com, a popular tool that allows users to find and automatically annotate unique faces that apepar throughout their photo collections. In 2009 Face.com launched a Facebook application that first asks users to identify a Facebook friend of theirs ina photo and then proceeds to search the social networking site for other pictures in which that friend appears. By early 2010, the company boasted of scanning 9 billion pictures and identifying 52 million individuals. This is the kind of productivity that would make the KGB envious.

Effort | Empathy | Feelings | Focus | Important | Knowing | Need | Observation | Opposition | People | Problems | Reading | Search | Security | Space | Technology | Understanding | Waiting | Work |

Ernest Newman

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.

Care | Good | Government | Health | Mistake | Government | Learn |

Eva Zeisel

When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.

Feelings | Heart | Love | Pleasure | Following |

Ernest Becker

Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Body | Death | Education | Man | Means | Mistake | Taste | Will | Child |

Ernest Becker

If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power­lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his sym­bolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one ac­cidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of ab­surdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?

Absolute | Character | Discussion | Dread | Faith | Feelings | Heart | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Psychology | Religion | Self | Service | Time | Value |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Feelings | Will |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going to drop?

Art | Children | Mistake | Mother | Respect | Respect | Art |

Ernest Callenbach

Certainly Ecotopians regard trees as being alive in almost a human sense Â… And equally certainly, lumber in Ecotopia is cheap and plentiful Â… Wood therefore takes the place that aluminum, bituminous facings, and many other modern materials occupy with us.

Feelings | Order | People |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Anytime you have physical discomfort of any kind, whether you call it emotional or physical pain within your body, it ALWAYS means the same thing: "I have a desire that is summoning energy, but I have a belief that is not allowing, so I've created resistance in my body." The solution, every single time, to the releasing of discomfort and pain is the relaxation and the reaching for the feeling of relief.

Attention | Change | Feelings | Good | Important | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The victory of the Cuban Revolution will be a tangible demonstration before all the Americas that peoples are capable of rising up, that they can rise up by themselves right under the very fangs of the monster.

Feelings |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Let the world change you and you can change the world.

Feelings | Risk |

Eugene Peterson

We live in a society that is in slavery. Maybe not institutionalized, but slavery, nonetheless. Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence we live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts. –

Children | Faith | Feelings | God | Wife | God | Learn |

Eugene Peterson

We must desire God for ourselves and not as a means of fulfillment of our own wishes. It is a blessed mark of growth out of spiritual infancy when we can forgo the joys which once appeared to be essential, and can find our solace in him who denies them to us.

Authenticity | Feelings | God | Wisdom | Worship | God | Think |

Eugene Peterson

Our days are busy with little leisure for frills. We have work to do, interests to pursue, books to read, letters to write, the telephone to answer, errands to run, children to raise, investments to tend to, the lawn to mow, food to prepare and serve, the garbage to take out. We don’t need God’s help or counsel in doing any of these things. God is necessary for the big things, most obviously creation and salvation. But for the rest we can, for the most part, take care of ourselves. That usually adds up to a workable life, at least when accompanied by a decent job and a good digestion. But—it is not the practice of resurrection; it is not growing up in Christ, it is not living in the company of the Trinity.

Depression | Feelings | Security |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

There is evidence that the faculty of reflection will appear as soon as our senses begin to develop, and it is equally true that we have the use of the senses from an early age, just because at an early age we began to reflect.

Distinguish | Error | Fame | Impression | Mistake | Perception |