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

Ichabod Smith Spencer

You must make your choice whether to hold on to some thing which cannot save you, or let go, and fall into the hands of the Lord.

Choice | Lord | Wisdom |

Thomas De Witt Talmage

The costliest thing on earth is the drunkard’s song. It costs ruin of body. It costs ruin of mind...The costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the Song of the Drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations - not a protective tariff, but a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, an tariff of death.

Body | Death | Earth | Mind | Music | Nations | Sin | Wisdom | Woe |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

Better | Focus | Happy | Man | Wisdom | Woman |

William Warburton

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any; one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

Birth | Wisdom |

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end.

Beginning | God | Man | Religion | Wisdom | God |

James Shelby Thomas

The only limitless thing I know of is human want. Civilization itself is nothing more than the creation of wants, followed by methods of satisfying those wants.

Civilization | Nothing | Wants | Wisdom |

Robert Penn Warren

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.

Capacity | Life | Life | Light | Little | Man | Myth | Wisdom | Poem |

T. H. White, fully Terence Hanbury White

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.

Wisdom | Learn |

Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole

Don't play for safety - it's the most dangerous thing in the world.

Play | Wisdom | World |

Edward Noyes Westcott

I've often had to notice that a man'll sometimes do the foolishist thing or the meanest thing in his hull life after he's dead.

Life | Life | Man | Wisdom |

Lane Weston

There is no such thing as an average man. Each one of us is a unique individual. Each one of us expresses his humanity and his divinity in some distinctly different way. The beauty and the bloom of each human soul is a thing apart - a separate holy miracle under God, never once repeated throughout all the millenniums of time.

Beauty | Divinity | God | Humanity | Individual | Man | Soul | Time | Unique | Wisdom | Beauty |

Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly.

Enough | Good | Mind | People | Problems | Reality | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Work | Learn | Think |

Thales, aka Thales of Miletus NULL

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

Life | Life | Wisdom |

Tertullian, fully Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian NULL

Every creation is subject to recurrence. Every thing you meet had a previous existence: whatever you have lost will come again. Every thing comes a second time: all things return to a settled position when they have gone away, all things begin when they have ceased to be. They are brought to an end in order that they may come into being: nothing is lost except that it may be recovered. All this revolving order of things, therefore, is evidence of the resurrection of the dead. God ordained it in works before He commanded it in writing, He proclaimed it by strength before he proclaimed it in words. He first sent you nature as teacher, intending to send you prophecy also, in order that having learnt from nature, you may the more easily believe prophecy.

Evidence | Existence | God | Nature | Nothing | Order | Position | Prophecy | Strength | Time | Will | Wisdom | Words | Writing | God |