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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Books | Good |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good dayÂ’s work.

Books |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.

Death | Pleasure | Writing | Vice |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Books | Boys | Government | Hope | Man | Politics | Will | Government |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn't thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed in that although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was the real one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew it very well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight? Bread is the opium of the people.

Pleasure | Reading | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though.

Books |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Books |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

Books |

Ethel Barrymore

Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.

Grace | Memory |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

As you think thoughts that feel good to you, you will be in harmony with who you really are.

Means | Pleasure | Practice | Time | Will |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Further, laws and public transactions, together with everything that deserved the attention of mankind, were multiplied to such a degree, that the memory grew too weak for so heavy a burden; and human societies increased in such a manner, that the promulgation of the laws could not, without difficulty, reach the ears of every individual.

Ideas | Man | Memory |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

The whole tribe of philosophers have fallen into the fame error with Locke. Some of them, who pretend that every perception leaves an image in the mind, in the same manner almost as a seal leaves its impression behind it, are not to be excepted: for what is the image of a perception, which is not the perception itself? The mistake is owing to this, that for want of having sufficiently considered the matter, they have mistaken, for the very perception of the object, some circumstances, or some general idea, which revive themselves in its stead. To avoid such mistakes, I shall here distinguish the different perceptions we are capable of feeling, and examine them each in their proper order.

Dawn | Enough | Habit | Memory |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

Beauty | Books | Freedom | Joy | Mystery | Need | Beauty |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

I can do what I want, but the trouble is that I do not quite know what to do.

Enjoyment | Love | Man | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Hence arises a perception which represents them to us as distant and limited; and which consequently implies the idea of some extension.

Attention | Memory | Public |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.

Love | Man | Melancholy | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Eudora Welty

My tendency is to believe that all experience is an enrichment instead of an impoverishment.

Pain | Pleasure | Think |

Eugene Peterson

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

Books | Choice | Church | Size | Learn |

Eudora Welty

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

Books | Love | Reading | Story | Time |