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

William Shakespeare

No profit grows where is no pleasure taken; in brief, sir, study what you most affect.

Pleasure | Study |

Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL

No words can describe it, no example can point to it. Samsara does not make it worse, Nirvana does not make it better. It has never been born, it has never ceased. It has never been liberated, it has never been deluded. It has never existed, it has never been non existent. It has no limits at all. It does not fall into any kind of category.

Better | Example | Words |

Ezra Taft Benson

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother’s influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children’s needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home—and how apparent when neglected!

Children | Decision | Example | Influence | Mother | Theories | Training | Truth | Work | Child |

Friedrich Engels

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.

Doctrine | Existence | Labor | Life | Life | Proletariat | Society | Society |

Francis Bacon

The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate.

Curiosity | Desire | Error | Glory | Knowledge | Learning | Men | Mind | Rest | Wit |

Freeman John Dyson

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay.

Consequences | Example | Good | Life | Life | Technology |

Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno

The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life. The greatest asses of the world are those who, lacking all understanding and instruction, and void of all civil life and custom, rot in perpetual pedantry; those who by the grace of heaven would reform obscure and corrupted faith, salve the cruelties of perverted religion and remove abuse of superstitions, mending the rents in their vesture. It is not they who indulge impious curiosity or who are ever seeking the secrets of nature, and reckoning the courses of the stars. Observe whether they have been busy with the secret causes of things, or if they have condoned the destruction of kingdoms, the dispersion of peoples, fires, blood, ruin or extermination; whether they seek the destruction of the whole world that it may belong to them: in order that the poor soul may be saved, that an edifice may be raised in heaven, that treasure may be laid up in that blessed land, caring naught for fame, profit or glory in this frail and uncertain life, but only for that other most certain and eternal life.

Abuse | Curiosity | Eternal | Glory | Grace | Heaven | Life | Life | Order | Reform | Religion | Rule | Soul | Understanding | World | Blessed |

George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative. Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.

Doctrine | Future | Government | Opposition | Order | Policy | Purpose | Purpose | Will | World | Government |

J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright

In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest.

Enjoyment | Example | Freedom | People | Society | World | Society |

Jim Rohn

To become financially independent you must turn part of your income into capital, turn capital into enterprise, turn enterprise into profit, turn profit into investment, and turn investment into financial independence.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

People who routinely insist on the illegitimacy of blaming victims now do it. No one deserved what happened to them on September 11, neither the immediate victims and their families nor the country itself. Cannot a powerful country bleed? Are not its citizens as mortal as those anywhere? Simple human recognition along these lines does not deter the literary theorist Frederic Jameson from seeing in these horrific events "a textbook example of dialectical reversal."

Events | Example | Mortal |

John C. Maxwell

A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

Enough | Man |

John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”

When the soul, then, in any degree possesses the spirit of solitary love, we must not interfere with it. We should inflict a grievous wrong upon it, and upon the Church also, if we were to occupy it, were it only for a moment, in exterior or active duties, however important they might be. When God Himself adjures all not to waken it from its love, who shall venture to do so, and be blameless? In a word, it is for this love that we are all created. Let those men of zeal, who think by their preaching and exterior works to convert the world, consider that they would be much more edifying to the Church, and more pleasing unto God — setting aside the good example they would give if they would spend at least one half their time in prayer, even though they may have not attained to the state of unitive love.

Church | Example | God | Good | Important | Love | Men | Spirit | Time | Wrong | God | Think |

John Hersey, fully John Richard Hersey

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

Children | Failure | Regard | Vision | Failure |

John Taylor Gatto

By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers - backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling: teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, et al. - has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.

Children | Will | Teacher |

John Stuart Mill

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

Better | Example | Need | Sense | Taste | Truths |

Karl Mannheim, alternatively Mannheim Károly

We are faced with the curiously appalling trend of modern thought, in which the absolute which was once a means of entering into communion with the divine, has now become an instrument used by those who profit from it, to distort, pervert, and conceal the meaning of the present.

Absolute | Meaning | Means |

Jules Henry

The schools have never been places for the stimulation of young minds. If all through school the young were provoked to question the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of patriotism, the profit motive, the two-party system, monogamy, the laws of incest, and so on, we would have more creativity than we could handle.

Creativity | Question |

Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

Fools – in other words most people – imagine that it would be a wonderful achievement to be able to recover our youth; but those who know life are aware how little it would profit us.

Achievement | Life | Life | Little | People | Words |

Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL

The longness and shortness of the present moment can be recognized by utilizing a big image of the moon, which is reflecting on the surface of the ocean, and a small image of the moon on the surface of a cup of water, or in another example the very wide scale of the whole sky itself, and the very narrow space of the moon, which is shining in the sky.

Example | Present | Space |