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

William James

The most general elements and workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with for his purposes.

Example | Faith | Work |

William Law

God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.

God | Good | Life | Life | Men | Nature | Obedience | People | Present | Soul | Strength | Work | God |

William Law

You are to honor, improve, and perfect the spirit that is within you: you are to prepare it for the kingdom of heaven, to nourish it with the love of God and of virtue, to adorn it with good works, and to make it as holy and heavenly as you can.

Alms | Chastity | God | Heart | Praise | Wills | Work | God |

William James

This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.

Art | Cost | History | Human nature | Law | Mission | Nations | Nature | Need | Time | Work | Art |

William James

Seek out that particular mental attitude which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, "This is the real me," and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

Contrast | People | Truth | Work |

William James

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

Eternal | History | Individual | Truth | Work |

William James

Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task

Conquest | Love | Man | Passion | Work |

William James

There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.

Little | Method | Science | Style | Work |

William Law

You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them -- especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it.

Evil | God | Good | Love | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Revenge | Sin | Temper | Vengeance | Work | God |

William Law

This useful, charitable, humble employment of yourselves is what I recommend to you with greatest earnestness, as being a substantial part of a wise and pious life.

Birth | God | Hell | Love | Nature | Nothing | Power | Spirit | Will | Wills | Work | God |

William James

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Consciousness | Hypothesis | Metaphysics | Psychology | Soul | Theology | Unity | Work |

William James

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

Life | Life | Opinion | Work | Worth | Value |

William James

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

Authority | Civilization | Cruelty | Discipline | Doubt | Duty | Force | Little | Manliness | Men | Opinion | Public | Question | War | Work | Cruelty | Afraid |

William Morris

I too will go, remembering what I said to you, when any land, the first to which we came seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame, and all seemed won to you: but still I think, perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink, unless by some ill chance I first am slain. But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain.

Happy | Imagination | Man | Memory | Men | Mind | Past | Pleasure | Soul | Will | Wills | Work | Think |

William Morris

Meanwhile the dragon, seeing him clean gone, followed him not, but crying horribly, caught up within her jaws a block of stone and ground it into powder, then turned she, with cries that folk could hear far out at sea, and reached the treasure set apart of old, to brood above the hidden heaps of gold.

Man | Men | Work |

William Morris

If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.

Day | Fear | Hope | Leisure | Work |

William Morris

It seems to me that the sense of beauty in the external world, of interest in the life of man as a drama, and the desire of communicating this sense of beauty and interest to our fellows is or ought to be an essential part of the humanity of man, and that any man or set of men lacking that sense are less than men, and lack a portion of their birthright just as they were blind or deaf.

Men | Right | Work | Worth |

William Morris

Dawn talks to day over dew-gleaming flowers, night flies away

Leisure | Following |

William Morris

I have the utmost respect for them. It was formed at the time of great violence and danger, particularly for African-American lawyers.

Art | Destroy | Energy | Giving | Hope | Impulse | Labor | Work | Worth | Art |

William Morris

Nay, spring was o'er-happy and knew not the reason, and summer dreamed sadly, for she thought all was ended in her fulness of wealth that might not be amended; but this is the harvest and the garnering season, and the leaf and the blossom in the ripe fruit are blended.

Dreams | Work |