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

Elizabeth Gilbert

But why must everything have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years - working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty? In this dark period of loss, did I need any justification for learning Italian other than that it was the only thing I could imagine bringing me any pleasure right now?

Good | Love | Means | Woman |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?

Challenge | Comfort | Enough | Humanity | Means | Money | Need | People | Pleasure | Search | Skill | System | Time | Will | World |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.

Accomplishment | Beauty | Experience | Means | Need | Nothing | Order | Beauty |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!

Family | Loneliness | Means | Nature | Will | Worry |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call The Physics of The Quest- a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting(which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments)and set out on a truth-seeking journey(either externally or internally),and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared - most of all -to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself....then truth will not be withheld from you. Or so I've come to believe.

Good | Love | Means |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I do not need to love you to prove that I love myself!!

Ability | Means | Men |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I would build a cloudy House for my thoughts to live in; when for earth too fancy-loose and too low for Heaven! Hush! I talk my dream aloud - I build it bright to see, - I build it on the moonlit cloud, to which I looked with thee.

Means | Patience |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.

Eternal | Evolution | God | History | Humanity | Ideas | Individual | Longing | Means | Need | Nothing | Order | Peace | Providence | Right | Sacred | Search | Spirit | Story | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wonder | God | Think | Thought |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nosegays! leave them for the waking, throw them earthward where they grew dim are such, beside the breaking amaranths he looks unto. Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.

Love | Means |

Elizabeth Gilbert

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

Good | Means |

Elizabeth Gilbert

To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you make. It has very little thing to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

Enjoyment | Means | Rhetoric |

Elizabeth Gilbert

The culture of Rome just doesn't match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I've decided that Rome and Yoga don't have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word toga.

Cause | Desire | Means | Object | Suffering | Will | Happiness | Think |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A woman is always younger than a man at equal years.

Action | Means | Men | Rest | Woman |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

My lord, the crown which I have borne so long has given enough of vanity in my time. I beseech you not to augment it in this hour when I am so near my death.

Care | Love | Means | Passion |

Ellen Goodman

How come pleasure never makes it on to ... a dutiful list of do's and don'ts? Doesn't joy also get soft and flabby if you neglect to exercise it?

Means |

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.

Absolute | Attainment | Labor | Means | Nature | Sacrifice | Woman | Worth |

Elizabeth Gould Davis

Congenital killers and criminals are possessed of not one but two Y chromosomes, bearing a double dose, as it were, of genetically undesirable maleness.

Means | Survival |

Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.

Children | Means | Success | Training | Child |

Emil M. Cioran

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Beginning | Means | Solitude |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man.

Abundance | Body | Conversation | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Meditation | Money | Need | People | Reading | Spirit | Time | World | Think | Understand |