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

Jacques Maritain

With respect to God and truth, one has not the right to choose according to his own whim any path whatsoever, he must choose the true path, in so far as it is in his power to know.

God | Power | Respect | Right | Truth | Wisdom | Respect | God |

John Locke

It is labor... which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything.

Labor | Land | Wisdom | Worth | Value |

Abraham Lincoln

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Government | People | Right | Wisdom |

Abraham Lincoln

Let us have faith that right makes right, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Duty | Faith | Right | Wisdom | Understand |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

There is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

Knowing | Longing | Wisdom | Worth |

Jacques Maritain

The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time.

Absolute | Association | Body | Choice | Conduct | Destiny | Dignity | Existence | Family | Freedom | God | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Order | Perfection | Personal freedom | Respect | Right | Rights | Society | Time | Will | Wisdom | Society | Respect | God | Value |

John Locke

Every man is born with a double right. First, a right of freedom to his person, which no other man has a owner over, but the free disposal of it lies in himself. Secondly, a right before any other man, to inherit, with his brethren, his father’s goods.

Father | Freedom | Man | Right | Wisdom |

Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Bourgeoisie | Freedom | History | Wisdom | Worth |

Joseph Fort Newton

We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we take it, what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end. How to take the raw stuff of life and make it a thing of worth and beauty - that is the test of living.

Beauty | Life | Life | Wisdom | Worth | Beauty |

Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

I never listen to calumnies, because, if they are untrue, I run the risk of being deceived, and if they are true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.

Risk | Thinking | Wisdom | Worth |

Margaret E. Mulac

Solitude is important to man. It is necessary to his achievement of peace and contentment. It is a well into which he dips for refreshment for his soul. It is his laboratory in which he distills the pure essence of worth from the raw materials of his experiences. It is his refuge when the very foundations of his life are being shaken by disastrous events.

Achievement | Contentment | Events | Important | Life | Life | Man | Peace | Solitude | Soul | Wisdom | Worth |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

It is absurd to speak of right and wrong per se. Injury, violation, exploitation, annihilation, cannot be wrong in themselves, for life essentially presupposes injury, violation, exploitation, and annihilation.

Absurd | Life | Life | Right | Wisdom | Wrong |

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley

Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in a broad, intelligent, and spacious way.

Good | Little | Wisdom | Worth |

Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley

Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority.

Education | Obligation | Respect | Responsibility | Right | Society | Sound | Superiority | Teach | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Respect | Youth |

Thomas Love Peacock

There is no worth nor beauty but in the mind's idea.

Beauty | Mind | Wisdom | Worth | Beauty |

William Penn

What man in his right mind would conspire his own hurt? Men are beside themselves when they transgress against their convictions.

Convictions | Man | Men | Mind | Right | Wisdom |

Robert Peel, fully Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet

Public opinion is compounded by folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

Folly | Opinion | Prejudice | Public | Right | Weakness | Wisdom | Wrong |