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

Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness.

Conscience | Injustice | Injustice | Religion | Sense | Guilty |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

Personally, I have always felt that the best doctor in the world is the Veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter...he's just got to know.

Conscience | Work | Think |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

Just been talking today out here to all the Senators investigating these stock swindles and overcapitalizations. There has been hundreds of millions lost. There ought to be some form of guardianship for people that buy all this junk. Education won't do it. (The buyers are) the ones we have educated up till they are just smart enough to fall for everything that comes along.

Association | Conscience | Work | Association | Think |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

We live in an age of 'urge'. We do nothing till somebody shoves us.

Conscience | Little | Nothing | People | Plan | Reason | Wealth | Wrong | Think |

Walter Lippmann

Our faults and sins seem all the bigger when they are seen by the world against the excessively self-righteous picture that is our official version of ourselves.

Change | Conscience | Eternal | Means |

Washington Irving

By a kind of fashionable discipline, the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to emanate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness and good-will.

Conscience | Grave | Love | Past |

W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act.

Angels | Industry | Men | People | World |

W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and clasical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.

Agitation | Authority | Change | Church | Conscience | Controversy | Doctrine | Enthusiasm | Force | Language | Light | Men | Method | Peace | Principles | Reason | Religion | Right | Sense | Spirit | Theology | Will |

Wallace Stevens

Politic man ordained imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears must be the crux for our compendia.

Conscience | Law | Moral law |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.

Character | Conscience | Emotions | Family | History | Individual | Magic | Mind | Work | World |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

Someday death will take us to another star.

Conscience | Good |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

Life | Life |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul.

Agony | Conscience | Deeds | Judgment | Soul | Truth | Deeds |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

The less life in a person, the more he will try to live off your life.

Knowledge | Nothing | Order |

Victor Hugo

There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.

Conscience |

Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

Cause | Conscience | Dedication | Surrender | Will | Happiness | Think |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

Follow 'this' path... it is easily accessible and the cart can move freely on it.... treading on which the brave ones do not get vanquished and which also provides better prospects for earning wealth.

Conscience | Love | Will | World |

Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

A new burst of rage swept over him — What did it matter whether it was true or not — whether anything was true or not? What did it matter if anybody had done all the hideous and loathsome things that everybody else said they had done? It was what everybody was saying! It was what everybody believed — what everybody was interested in! It was the measure of a whole society — their ideals and their standards! It was the way they spent their time, repeating nasty scandals about each other; living in an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, with endless whispering and leering, and gossip of low intrigue.

Conscience | Good | Order | People | Progress | Science |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

Are we surprised if a sick man cannot walk, or keep awake, or stand upright? Would it not be more surprising if he was the same man as when he was well? If we have a headache, or have slept badly, we are excused for telling incapable of work, and yet no one suspects us of always being lazy. Shall we deny a dying man the privilege we grant a man with a headache? And dare we assert that the man who lacks courage in his last agony never possessed virtue when he was well.

Culture |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities, and to make the most of one's resources.