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

Elbert Green Hubbard

Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

Need | Will | Friends |

Eric Hoffer

Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

Good | Integrity | Intelligence | Sense | Taste |

Francis Bacon

It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely: and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.

Better | God | Opinion | Superstition | Unbelief | God |

Eric Hoffer

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass-movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the single-handed defiance of the world.

Defiance | Ideas | Opinion | Play | World |

Felix Adler

We live truly in our radiations. We grow and develop in proportion as we help others to grow and develop.

Frank Crane

Our best friends and our worst enemies are our thoughts.

Friends |

Francis Bacon

Those that want (lack) friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.

Friends |

François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot

The study of art is a taste at once engrossing and unselfish, which may be indulged without effort, and yet has the power of exciting the deepest emotions - a taste able to exercise and to gratify both the nobler and softer parts of our nature.

Art | Effort | Emotions | Nature | Power | Study | Taste | Art |

George Bernard Shaw

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a true force of Nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, an, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

Force | Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Little | Nature | Opinion | Purpose | Purpose | Will | World | Privilege |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.

Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |

George Bernard Shaw

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Man |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Thus to be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science.

Life | Life | Opinion | Public | Science |

George MacDonald

In giving, a man receives more than he gives, and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given.

Giving | Man | Worth |

George Santayana

One's friends are the part of the human race with which one can be human.

Human race | Race | Friends |

George Santayana

Two protecting deities, indeed, like two sober friends supporting a drunkard, flank human folly and keep it within bounds. One of these deities is Punishment and the other Agreement.

Folly | Punishment | Friends |

George Santayana

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people and friends in spots.

Mind | People | Friends |

Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their action.

Action | Consequences | Opinion | Public |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

Live each season as it passes; breath the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Taste |