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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach use? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation.

Character | Dawn | Evil | Gloom | Good | Light | Pain | Pleasure | Resignation | Teach | Happiness |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

A small minority are enabled... to find happiness along the path of love; but far-reaching mental transformations of the erotic function are necessary before this is possible. These people make themselves independent of their object’s acquiescence by transferring the main value from the fact of being loved to their own act of loving; they protect themselves against loss of it by attaching their love not to individual objects but to all men equally, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aim and modifying the instinct which they induce in themselves by this process - an unchangeable, undeviating, tender attitude - has little superficial likeness to the stormy vicissitudes of genital love, from which it is nevertheless derived.

Character | Individual | Instinct | Little | Love | Men | Object | People | Loss | Vicissitudes | Happiness | Value |

Monica Furlong

The best arguments in favor of marriage and family life are not that they promote happiness and reduce loneliness, though at their best they do these things, but that they create a situation in which facing the truth about ourselves - our self-deceiving, touchy, vain, inflated selves - becomes more difficult to avoid than it is anywhere else.

Character | Family | Life | Life | Loneliness | Marriage | Self | Truth | Happiness |

Henry Fielding

Domestic happiness is the end of almost all our pursuits, and the common reward of all our pains.

Character | Reward | Wisdom | Happiness |

Paul Fleming, also spelled Flemming

Much has been said about the relative happiness; but write it on your heart that happiness is the cheapest thing in the world - when we buy it for someone else.

Character | Heart | World | Happiness |

J. de Finod

Grief counts the seconds; happiness forgets the hours.

Character | Grief | Happiness |

Benjamin Franklin

Avarice and happiness never saw each other, how then should they become acquainted.

Avarice | Character | Happiness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it.

Character | Man | Talent | Happiness |

Henry Fielding

Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.

Art | Body | Character | Good | Art | Happiness |

Frank Bunker Gilberth, Sr.

We're worn into grooves by Time - by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second rate or champions, each in his way in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness - achievement.

Achievement | Character | Day | Mind | Peace | Time | Will | Happiness |

Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

A man who feels that his religion is a slavery has not begun to comprehend the real nature of religion.

Character | Man | Nature | Religion | Slavery |

Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Character | Love | Happiness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility, poverty, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.

Character | Death | Humility | Poverty | Religion | Reverence | Suffering |

Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

Whatever can lead an intelligent being to the exercise or habit of mental enjoyment, contributes more to his happiness than the highest sensual or mere bodily pleasures. The one feeds the soul, while the other, for the most part, only exhausts the frame, and too often injures the immortal part... Let all seen enjoyments lead to the unseen fountain from whence they flow.

Character | Enjoyment | Habit | Soul | Happiness |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.

Character | Endurance | Pride | Religion |

Newell Dwight Hillis

Our world is a college, events are teachers, happiness is the graduating point, character is the diploma God gives man.

Character | Events | God | Man | World | God | Happiness |

David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker

Human happiness is the true odour of growth, the sweet exhalation of work.

Character | Growth | Work | Happiness |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Within you is a potential for happiness that does not diminish nor ripen over time.

Character | Time | Happiness |