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

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

The sound of the English country families baying for broken glass.

Day | Death | Guests |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

The audiences certainly have [declined]. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.

Death | Hunger | Suspense |

Felix Adler

It may be impossible for a man by merely willing it to add wings to his body, but it is possible for any man, by merely willing it, to add wings to his soul. This perennial miracle of the moral nature is capable of happening at any time.

Death | Enemy | Fear | Life | Life |

Felix Adler

The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.

Death | Distinguish | Gold | Lesson |

Felix Adler

Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences. Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.

Death | Good | Memory | Spirit | Learn | Think |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Death | Life | Life |

Italian Proverbs

Thank you, pretty pussy, was the death of my cat.

Death | Good | Hypothesis | Individual | Phenomena | Sense | Loss |

Italian Proverbs

The loquacity of fools is a lecture to the wise.

Death |

Italian Proverbs

When the head aches all the members languish.

Death | Order |

Italian Proverbs

Very seldom does any good thing arise but there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it.

Birth | Childhood | Death | Irony | Paradox | Religion | Time | Work |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Being a cult figure in one's own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant. However I do not find that it tends to puff one up: in my case at any rate it makes me feel extremely small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very modest idol cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense.

Death | Marriage | Need | Rites | Crisis |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

Life implies constant activity, and the vital principle was accordingly regarded as something essentially active, constantly controlling and therefore interfering with physical tendencies towards disintegration of organic structure, and building up new organic structure in the process of nutrition and reproduction.

Body | Death | Evidence | Life | Life | Time |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose.

Death |