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

Wendell Berry

The expert knowledge of agriculture developed in the universities, like other such knowledges, is typical of the alien order imposed on a conquered land. We can never produce a native economy, much less a native culture, with this knowledge. It can only make us the imperialist invaders of our own country.

Hunger | Means | Mind | Vision |

Wendell Berry

The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.

Care | Cultivation | Culture | Ideas | Meaning | Means | Sense | Understanding | Words | Worship |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Means |

Wendell Berry

Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.

Good | Means | Thinking | Time | Will |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Earth, receive an honored guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie emptied of its poetry.

Change | Fate | Grace | Means | Music | Peace | Promise | Right | Sadness | Sound | Story | Thought | Time | Words | Fate | Thought |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one

Change | Means | Music | Peace | Right | War | Words |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

Means |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

Care | Happy | Means | Pain |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

To know all is to forgive all. No commonplace is more untrue. Behavior, whether conditioned by an individual neurosis or by society, can be understood, that is to say, one knows exactly why such and such an individual behaves as he does. But a personal action or deed is always mysterious. When we really act, precisely because it is a matter of free choice, we can never say exactly why we do this rather than that. But it is only deeds that we are required to forgive. If someone does me an injury, the question of forgiveness only arises if I am convinced (a) that the injury he did me was a free act on his part and therefore no less mysterious to him than to me, and (b) that it was me personally whom he meant to injure. He knows as well as they do why they are doing this -- they are a squad, detailed to execute a criminal. They do not know what they are doing, because it is not their business, as executioners, to know whom they are crucifying. If the person who does me an injury does not know what he is doing, then it is as ridiculous for me to talk about forgiving him as it would be for me to forgive a tile which falls on my head in a gale.

Choice | Guilt | Means | Sense | Sin | Guilty |

W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

I like thieves. Some of my best friends are thieves. Why, just last week we had the president of the bank over for dinner.

Influence | Means |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.

Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.

Death | Honor | Means | Mother | Mystery | Need | World |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.

Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

I enjoyed the mathematics that I had time to learn. If I ever need or want to learn some more, I shall not be afraid to do so.

Crime | Energy | Force | Fulfillment | Good | Important | Individual | Learning | Little | Means | Sense | Society | Will | Wishes | Society |

Walker Percy

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

Means | Reading | Theories | Time | World |

Walker Percy

He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

Defeat | Life | Life | Logic | Means | Will |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist.

Knowledge | Means | Right | Understand |

Wallace Stevens

We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems. It is the huge, high harmony that sounds a little and a little, suddenly, by means of a separate sense. It is and it is not and, therefore, is.

Gold | Man | Means |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

Even peasants wholly without knowledge of the quarters of the sky believe that oxen ought to face only in the direction of the sunrise.

Ability | Care | Means |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Modern natural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if we learn to help them) will find in the Hegelian dialectics, materialistically interpreted, a series of answers to the philosophical problems which are being raised by the revolution in natural science.

Capitalism | Inevitable | Means | Property |