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

Amos Bronson Alcott

Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity, and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without his ornament.

Heart | Manners | Modesty | Respect | Reverence | Self | Sensibility | Sentiment |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Patriotism is often understood to mean only a readiness for exceptional sacrifices and actions. Essentially, however, it is the sentiment which, in the relationships of our daily life and under ordinary conditions, habitually recognizes that the community is one’s substantive groundwork and end. It is out of this consciousness, which during life’s daily round stands the test in all circumstances, that there subsequently also arises the readiness for extraordinary exertions. But since men would often rather be magnanimous than law-abiding, they readily persuade themselves that they possess this exceptional patriotism in order to be sparing in the expression of a genuine patriotic sentiment or to excuse their lack of it. If again this genuine patriotism is looked upon as that which may begin of itself and arise from subjective ideas and thoughts, it is being confused with opinion, because so regarded patriotism is deprived of its true ground, objective reality.

Circumstances | Consciousness | Ideas | Law | Life | Life | Men | Opinion | Order | Patriotism | Reality | Sentiment |

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce

Law will never be strong or respected unless it has the sentiment of the people behind it.

Law | People | Sentiment | Will |

John Ruskin

The enormous influence of novelty - the way in which it quickens observation, sharpens sensation, and exalts sentiment - is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous.

Change | Enough | Influence | Novelty | Observation | Sentiment | Will | Novelty |

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

No society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.

Honor | Religion | Sentiment | Society | Society | Happiness |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.

Action | God | Good | Heart | Insight | Intuition | Justice | Man | Perfection | Purity | Sentiment | Soul | Space | Time |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A more secret, sweet and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him.

Beauty | Heart | Man | Mind | Sentiment | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that is seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion.

Justice | Law | Mankind | Religion | Sentiment |

William Hazlitt

By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.

Enthusiasm | Immortality | Influence | Knowledge | Mind | Nations | Power | Sentiment |

Guiseppe Mazzini

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

Sense | Sentiment |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

The idea of brotherhood redawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed; and thinkers of great soul like Lessing challenge the world to say which is more godlike, the hatred and tooth-and-nail grapple of conflicting religions, or sweet accord and mutual helpfulness. Ancient prejudice of man against his brother-man wavers and retreats before the radiance of a more generous sentiment, which will not sacrifice men to forms, or rob them of the comfort and strength they find in their own beliefs. The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations.

Age | Association | Brotherhood | Challenge | Comfort | Man | Men | Prejudice | Sacrifice | Sentiment | Soul | Strength | Thinkers | Will | World | Association |

Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet

Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.

Hero | Nature | Sentiment | Time |

Irving Babbitt

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

Sentiment | Virtue | Virtue |

Jacques Ellul

A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality. Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.

Distinction | Good | Respect | Sentiment | Weakness | Respect |

James Thomson

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?

Sentiment |

James Keller

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.

Adversity | Impatience | Sentiment |

Jane Addams

We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith.

Creed | Democracy | Dignity | Equality | Failure | Life | Life | Method | Rule | Sentiment | Failure | Learn |

Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. Some have never truly loved anything but themselves - perhaps because their first outreachings were received with coldness and lack of sympathy and then love quickly turns putrid, and becomes greed, and lust, and turns even to self- disgust. Some confine their love to the narrow limits of the family, and then too love decays into sentimentality, or hardens into indifference. The couple that are wrapped up in themselves soon find the parcel uncomfortably tight; the mother who pours out her love on her child till both are smothered in a cocoon of sentiment soon tastes the bitter worm of ingratitude and ruins the very object of her love. There are few more depressing spectacles than the perennial “old grad,” who has never broken the bonds of collegiate enthusiasm or developed beyond the throaty lore of Alma Matriolatry. And the present day provides us with the awful spectacle of what an ingrown love of country can do, what fanatical hatreds and cruelties it can engender, and how again it can destroy the very object of its love.

Day | Destroy | Enthusiasm | Family | Growth | Individual | Ingratitude | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Object | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Sentiment | Sympathy | Time | Unity | Universe | Will | World | Child | Learn |

Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.

Earth | Law | Sentiment |