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

Christian Nestell Bovee

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

Character | Grief | Wisdom |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The child’s grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man’s sorrow; and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame.

Character | Fame | Grief | Heart | Little | Man | Sorrow |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from the serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle.

Character | Grief | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Struggle | Thought | Thought | Understand |

William Cowper

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds, and as the mind is pitch’d, the ear is pleas’d with melting airs or martial, brisk, or grave; some chord in unison with what we hear is touch’d within us, and the heart replies.

Character | Grave | Heart | Mind | Sympathy |

Tyron Edwards

To rejoice in another’s prosperity is to give content to your own lot; to mitigate another’s grief is to alleviate or dispel your own.

Character | Grief | Prosperity |

Tyron Edwards

Quiet and sincere sympathy is often the most welcome and efficient consolation to the afflicted. Said a wise man to one in deep sorrow, "I did not come to comfort you; God only can do that; but I did come to say how deeply and tenderly I feel for you in your affliction."

Affliction | Character | Comfort | Consolation | God | Man | Quiet | Sorrow | Sympathy | Wise | God |

Karl Emil Franzos

The deepest grief is tearless.

Character | Grief | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One is led astray alike by sympathy and coldness, by praise and by blame.

Blame | Character | Praise | Sympathy |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

He who will not curb his passion, will wish that undone which his grief and resentment suggested, while he violently plies his revenge with unsated rancor. Rage is a short madness. Rule your passion, which commands, if it do not obey; do not restrain it with a bridle, and with fetters.

Character | Grief | Madness | Passion | Rage | Rancor | Resentment | Revenge | Rule | Will |

Lucy R. Goodwin

Words of understanding and sympathy are wonderful instruments for unlocking the hearts and minds of men. They transcend all cultures, turning strangers into brothers, blotting out tolerance and discrimination.

Character | Men | Sympathy | Understanding | Wisdom | Words |

David Hume

If we compare all these circumstances, we shall not doubt, that sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions.

Character | Circumstances | Doubt | Sympathy |

Frederick Dan Huntington

There’ll be no night in Heav’n, In that blest world above; No anxious toil, no weary hours; For labor there is love. There’ll be no sorrow there, There’ll be no sorrow there, In Heav’n above, where all is love, There’ll be no sorrow there. There’ll be no grief in Heav’n, For life is one glad day, And tears are those of former things Which all have passed way. There’ll be no sin in Heav’n; Behold that blessèd throng, All holy in their spotless robes, All holy in their song.

Action | Character | Conduct | Devotion | Faith | Good | Grief | Labor | Life | Life | Love | Sin | Sorrow | Suffering | Tears | Work | World | Blessed |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pity may represent little more than impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

Character | Giving | Little | Pity | Soul | Sympathy |

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Our sympathy is never very deep unless founded on our own feelings. We pity, but do not enter in to the grief which we have never felt.

Character | Feelings | Grief | Pity | Sympathy |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

It is a true observation of ancient writers, that as men are apt to be cast down by adversity, so they are easily satiated with prosperity, and that joy and grief produce the same effects. For whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight they fight from ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Adversity | Ambition | Character | Grief | Joy | Men | Necessity | Observation | Passion | Prosperity |

George Henry Lewes

The only cure for grief is action.

Action | Character | Grief | Wisdom |