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

Horace Traubel

Have I met the hour patiently, without fear, at the portal? Now is my name called, of the lip of my love has spoken: Do I mistake you, O divine Signaler? is it after all some other soul that is hailed. My self is my answer: there’s that in my heart responds, meeting the call with equal voice, establishing forever the unspeakable bond! Bond that does not bind - bond that frees - bond that discovers and bestows. Look! I am flushed with inexhaustible possessions! The old measures vanish, I am expanded to infinite sweep... Before birth, seeing birth, after life seeing life!... This minute grown infinite, the far worlds spread before me, the endless drift of soul...

Birth | Character | Fear | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mistake | Possessions | Self | Soul | Old |

Ralph Waldo Trine

There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest wisdom within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.

Character | Man | Power | Soul | Wisdom | World |

Francis Wayland

It is by what we ourselves have done, and not by what others have done for us, that we shall be remembered after ages. It is by thought that has aroused the intellect from its slumbers, which has given luster to virtue and dignity to truth, or by those examples which have inflamed the soul with the love of goodness.

Character | Dignity | Love | Soul | Thought | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Intellect | Thought |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Whatever satisfies souls is true; prudence entirely satisfies the craving and glut of souls, itself only finally satisfies the soul, the soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson but its own.

Character | Lesson | Pride | Prudence | Prudence | Soul |

William Wordsworth

Self-inspection - the best cure for self-esteem... By all means sometimes be alone; salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear; dare to look in thy chest, and tumble up and down what thou findest there.

Character | Esteem | Means | Self | Self-esteem | Soul |

Yehuda Alharizi, also Judah ben Solomon Harizi or al-Harizi

When is a prayer heard? When the soul is subdued.

Prayer | Soul | Wisdom |

Apocrypha NULL

He who injures the soul of man, injures his own soul.

Man | Soul | Wisdom |

Walter Bagehot

There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.

Contradiction | Mind | Price | Soul | Wisdom |

W. W. Battershall

What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms.

Awe | Death | Earth | Eternal | God | History | Life | Life | Power | Silence | Sorrow | Wisdom | God |

J. Beaumont

Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven; but when both are joined together, then doth the soul mount up to her eternal rest.

Earth | Eternal | Faith | Heaven | Rest | Soul | Will | Wisdom |

Hayim Nahim Bialik, also Chaim or Haim

As long as the soul animates man, and longs for light and thirsts for beauty, man needs the fountain of poetry.

Beauty | Light | Man | Poetry | Soul | Wisdom |

Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour

Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so places as not to have within his reach, in himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavor.

Eternal | Soul | Wisdom |

William Blake

The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by... melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

Body | Man | Soul | Wisdom |

Joanna Baillie

The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that would be stupid and irrational; but he whose noble soul subdues its fear, and bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from.

Danger | Fear | Man | Nature | Soul | Wisdom | Danger |

William Blake

Man has no body distinct from his Soul: for that called Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

Age | Body | Man | Soul | Wisdom |

Phillips Brooks

Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was means and made to do because he is still, in spite of it all, the child of God.

Day | Deeds | Desire | God | Life | Life | Man | Means | Soul | Thinking | Will | Wisdom | Deeds | Child |

Christian Nestell Bovee

Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sights are the signs of its greatest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

Joy | Love | Reason | Silence | Tenderness | Wisdom |