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

Thomas Brooks

Nothing humbles and breaks the heart of a sinner like mercy and love. Souls that converse much with sin and wrath, may be much terrified; but souls that converse much with grace and mercy, will be much; humbled.

Character | Grace | Heart | Love | Mercy | Nothing | Sin | Will |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliancy than justice.

Character | God | Justice | Mercy | Wisdom |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting a child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction wit the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury.

Body | Character | Justice | Mercy | Prison | Right | Society | Will | Wit | Wrong | Society | Child |

Allan Chalmers, fully Allan Knight Chalmers

Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year, and you will never be forgotten. Your name and your good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven.

Character | Deeds | Good | Heaven | Kindness | Love | Mercy | Will | Deeds |

Charles Sprague

Hate shuts her soul when dove-eyed mercy pleads.

Character | Hate | Mercy | Soul |

Honoré de Balzac

Marriage should combat without respite or mercy that monster which devours everything - habit.

Habit | Marriage | Mercy | Wisdom |

Benjamin R. Haydon

It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also His infinite justice.

God | Justice | Mercy | Need | Wisdom | God |

Alexander Smith

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

Man | Mercy | Wisdom |

Book of Golden Precepts, aka The Book of Golden Precepts NULL

Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin.

Action | Mercy | Sin |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

By negligence and silence we have all become accessory before the God of mercy to the injustice committed against the Negroes by men of our nation.

God | Injustice | Injustice | Men | Mercy | Silence | God |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Beyond all mystery is the mercy of God.

God | Mercy | Mystery |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

Mercy |

Isidore of Seville, fully Saint Isidore of Seville NULL

Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, never despair of the mercy of God. Hope and have confidence in confession.

Chance | Confidence | Despair | Hope | Mercy | Pardon | Sin |

Thomas Merton

The saint… wants himself to be simply a window through which God’s mercy shines on the world. And for this he strives to be holy… in order that the goodness of God may never be obscured by any selfish act of his.

God | Mercy | Order | Wants | World | God |

Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle

The Master responds to falsehood and truth, bad news and good news, inexactly the same way: “Is that so?” He allows the form of the moment, good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human drama. To him there is only this moment, and this moment is as it is. Events are not personalized. He is nobody’s victim. He is so completely at one with what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.

Events | Falsehood | Good | Mercy | News | Power | Truth | Unhappiness | Will | World | Happiness |

John Greenleaf Whittier

We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave of text and legend. Reason’s voice and God’s, Nature’s and Duty’s, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save justice and mercy and humility, a reasonable service of good deeds, pure living, tenderness to human needs, reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see the Master’s footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, but the calm beauty of an ordered life whose very breathing is unworded praise! A life that stands as all true lives have stood firm-rooted in the faith that God is good.

Beauty | Children | Deeds | Duty | Faith | Father | God | Good | Humility | Justice | Life | Life | Light | Mercy | Nature | Praise | Prayer | Reason | Reverence | Service | Tenderness | Trust | Beauty | God |

Charles Caleb Colton

There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to God. The victim of the fanatical persecutor will find that the stronger the motives he can urge for mercy are, the weaker will be his chance for obtaining it, for the merit of his destruction will be supposed to rise in value in proportion as it is effected at the expense of every feeling both of justice and of humanity.

Chance | Cruelty | God | Humanity | Justice | Mercy | Merit | Motives | Service | Will | Cruelty | Value | Victim |

Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

The essential and unbounded mercy of my Creator is the foundation of my hope, and a broader and surer the universe cannot give me.

Hope | Mercy | Universe |

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature, were man as unerring in his judgments as nature.

Cause | Earth | Forbearance | Inevitable | Man | Mercy | Nature | Punishment | Race |