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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

Revenge is a common passion; it is the sun of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble; but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.

Man | Nothing | Passion | Religion | Revenge | Wisdom |

Phillips Brooks

While men believe in the possibilities of children being religious, they are largely failing to make them so, because they are offering them not a child's but a man's religion - men's forms of truth and men's forms of experience.

Children | Experience | Man | Men | Religion | Truth | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.

Good | Religion | Wisdom |

John Caird

Religion is not a perpetual moping over good books. Religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances, these are necessary to religion - no man can be religious without them. But religion is mainly and chiefly the glorifying of god amid the duties and trials of the world; the guiding of our course amid adverse winds and currents of temptation by the sunlight of duty and the compass of Divine truth, the bearing up manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honor of Christ, our great Leader in the conflict of life.

Books | Duty | God | Good | Honor | Life | Life | Man | Praise | Prayer | Religion | Temptation | Trials | Truth | Wisdom | World | God | Leader | Temptation |

Richard Cecil

I extend the circle of real religion very widely. Many men fear God, and love God, and have sincere desire to serve him, whose views of religious truth are very imperfect, and in some points utterly false. But may not many such persons have a state of heart acceptable before God?

Desire | Fear | God | Heart | Love | Men | Religion | Truth | Wisdom |

John Caird

Carry religious principles into common life, and common life will lose its transitoriness. The world passes away. The things are seen as temporal. Soon business, with all its cares and anxieties, the whole “unprofitable stir and fever of the world” will be to us a thing of the past. But religion does something better than sigh and moan over the perishableness of earthly things. It finds in them the seeds of immortality.

Better | Business | Immortality | Life | Life | Past | Principles | Religion | Will | Wisdom | World |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life.

Life | Life | Religion | Rhetoric | Wisdom | Old |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

There is no religion without mystery. God Himself is the great secret of Nature.

God | Mystery | Nature | Religion | Wisdom | God |

Nathanial Culverwell, also spelled Nathaniel Culverwell

See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality - that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off the sproutings, all wild and luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core.

Heart | Looks | Morality | Religion | Wisdom |

Hermann Cohen

Ethics is the vital principle of Judaism. Its religion aims to be, and is, moral doctrine. Love of God is knowledge of God, and that is knowledge of the ultimate moral purpose of mankind.

Aims | Doctrine | Ethics | God | Knowledge | Love | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Religion | Wisdom | God |

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

Let your religion be seen. Lamps do not talk, but they do shine. A light house sounds no drum, it beats no gong; yet, far over the waters, its friendly light is seen by the mariner.

Light | Religion | Wisdom |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

If I had my life to live again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Wisdom | Loss |

John Dewey

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would have thus been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Wisdom | Loss |

Frances Power Cobbe

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

Morality | Religion | Wisdom |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

People | Poetry | Wisdom |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

In my religion there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry and doubt.

Doctrine | Doubt | Love | Poetry | Religion | Wisdom |